Teaching Sustainability Activism to Student Scientists: Peer Learning and Curricular Design

Abstract

Using a case study analysis of one undergraduate program that focuses on training science majors to perform sustainability outreach in their communities, this study offers pedagogical suggestions for how educators in universities might incorporate sustainability and activism into their curricular design.

This chapter discusses the relationship between the hard academic knowledge of the classroom and the outreach work done by the students by examining how curricular design and classroom activities lead to outreach work. Drawing on interviews, curriculum materials, and observations of staff meetings, this chapter examines how the course teachers use a peer-learning model to collaboratively develop the pedagogy of the classroom.

This model of teacher training through engagement with the content material of the course represents reflective learning practices. By being asked to break down and contextualize class themes and units for themselves as thinkers, the teachers first reflect on their own learning process and disciplinary participation as a way of developing course material for their students, who are themselves not incredibly far behind their facilitators in their own learning development.

The effectiveness of this practice suggests possibilities for using teacher training as a way to model the classroom space that each discipline believes best serve their learning goals. By first reflecting on their own individual relationship to the subject material, the teachers engage in a re-negotiation with knowledge that is synonymous with effective learning. The knowledge of the discipline is constantly re-negotiated around why that knowledge matters for each individual member of the discipline.

By considering how the classroom in this program combines disciplinary knowledge of environmental science with outreach and activist-oriented praxis, this case study analysis allows for pedagogical techniques that instructors might use with similar goals of combining traditional academic discourse with public outreach and participation.

Citation

Priest, J. (2020), "Teaching Sustainability Activism to Student Scientists: Peer Learning and Curricular Design", Sengupta, E., Blessinger, P. and Mahoney, C. (Ed.) Leadership Strategies for Promoting Social Responsibility in Higher Education (Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Vol. 24), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 63-76. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2055-364120200000024007