by Kristin Calhoun and Loretta Edelen

The opportunity to participate in the Global Citizenship Alliance (GCA) Seminar during the Summer of 2022 in Mondsee, Austria was a profoundly educational and transformative experience that has shaped the way we think about education and its role upon our return. The focus of the week-long Seminar was squarely on the urgent necessity of incorporating a sustainable model of thinking into the way education is delivered in our institutions. The information about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and how they reach into and touch every aspect of institutional education was both deep and wide, providing a much-needed underpinning for how we approach decision-making at every level.

We spent time in groups both large and small, focusing attention on the challenges educators continue to face around equality and equity and the ways those challenges can, do, and should intersect with sustainable practices and curricular alignment. The diversity of backgrounds and the range of administrative perspectives represented allowed for extremely productive conversations and potential solutions around how to incorporate sustainability into the curriculum at every level, from the classroom to the upper reaches of administrative policy.

Upon returning and reflecting, we have tried to move forward with these ideas in different, but equally necessary ways, reconsidering the ways in which routine activities and assignments can serve a wider need than previously thought.

On the community engagement side of things, initiatives designed to prepare high-school students transitioning into independence by sharing basic ‘adulting 101’ skills to increase their sense of self-sufficiency and preparedness are being delivered with a focus on sustainability at both the individual and the global level.

In the classroom, a summative project to integrate course material into the creation of a website based on self-reflection around personal values and career aspirations is linked to the wider arena of the Sustainability Development Goals and the ways they intersect with students, focusing on both their present and future.

These small, but meaningful interventions in the way we connect our students to their community and the world beyond are precisely the sort of bottom-up strategies that begin to build their capacity for participation in ever-more-complex sustainable initiatives throughout the course of their education and careers.