Sustainability for Teachers
Weaving regeneration into formal education
Start Date: 2024
Length: 7 weeks
Study Time: 4 hours +/ week
Target audience: Primary and Secondary School Teachers
Facilitation: With Facilitator
Registrations: until 2024
Why Sustainability for Teachers
Looking at education as one of the critical enablers for building the more beautiful world our heart know is possible, this course exists to support the roots of the world's education: Primary and Secondary School.
As kids enter the school systems, they are very often moved away from holistic and systemic thinking approaches, frequently distancing them from a deeper connection with life on earth and regenerative systems. Inspired by his experiences and Gaia Education 4D framework, Veljko Armano Linta has put together this deep and interactive course to co-create possibilities with teachers from all over the globe.
This is an opportunity for teachers that are seeking to make a difference, connect their purposes to a larger community of changemakers, and offer their school and students creative possibilities for learning and building regenerative cultures. The course also serves to support the teachers who are wondering how they can weave sustainability into teaching their subjects without putting an extra load on their students, and themselves.
The course journey...
The course starts with an introduction to integrative sustainability and regeneration in the context of current combined crises and motivates the participants to combine their areas of expertise in delivering interdisciplinary, participatory and transformational teaching to their students.
The participants then go through a sequence of steps in designing their own teaching activities that allow them to simultaneously achieve sustainability-related outcomes and the outcomes of their subject curricula. This creative work is done in teams that create interdisciplinary teaching scenarios rooted in SDGs, tackling real life topics students can relate to and engage, and written as contemporary pedagogical instructions for fellow teachers.
This creates an opportunity to apply the teaching activities in their own work and in tranforming their schools into collaborative communities that actively transform their local communities within the global drive towards a regenerative human presence on Earth. In order to support these future efforts, all along this course the participants build their competences in constructive face-to-face and online communication, collaboration and feedback.
Participants will learn:
- Why sustainability involves ecological, social, economic and worldview dimensions.
- About the urgency of transitioning into a regenerative human presence on Earth.
- Why we need close collaboration of different experts, and non-experts.
- SDGs as a tool for glocal action planning.
- Why we need transformational education to achieve SDGs.
- Understand the concept of interdisciplinary teaching scenarios.
- How to conceive a teaching activity that combines sustainability with their subject.
- How to conceive a teaching activity aligned with the SDGs.
- How to conceive a teaching activity aligned with contemporary pedagogical practices.
- How to constructively participate in a facilitated meeting.
- How to co-create teaching-scenario concepts with their contributions.
- How to write a teaching activity to be used by themselves and other teachers.
- How a school can embody and model regenerative practices.
- How their teaching scenarios can contribute to that process.
- What further education prospects there are at Gaia Education.
Keep me informed on the next course
- Understanding integrative sustainability/regeneration;
- Identifying links between Sustainable Development Goals and teachers' own subject outcomes;
- Creating teaching activities that use these links to allow their students to simultaneously learn about subject matter and sustainability;
- Writing activities as clear instructions to fellow teachers within interdiciplinary teaching scenarios;
- Constructive, collaborative and co-creative teamwork;
- Bringing change to their workplaces and local communities;
The Course was developed by Veljko Armano Linta, being an outcome of his passion and experiences in the field.
Module 1: Creating a Regenerative World
Creating your participant profile and getting acquainted with the course
Live online session
Creating a Regenerative World
Module 2: Transforming (through) Education
- Sustainable Development Goals as a Meta Curriculum
- Transformational Education for Regeneration
Module 3: Teaching Scenarios
- What Is an Interdisciplinary Teaching Scenario on Sustainable Development?
- How to Come Up with an Activity for a Teaching Scenario
Module 4: Teachers Working Together
- Live team session on 10/06/2023 (Sat) or 11/06/2023 (Sun)
- How to Write an Activity
Module 5: The Art of Feedback
- How to Give and Receive Feedback
- Fine-tuning your activity
Week 6: Creating a Regenerative School
- Creating a Regenerative School
- Making a plan for introducing teaching scenarios into your work
- Final online session
This course goes over waves of async and live interactions. From watching videos and writing by yourself to group design.
In a typical module you will encounter:
- Recorded video lessons and links for further reading.
- Reflection questions and Forum interactions for shared learning.
- Some creative work or collaborative work in pairs or teams.
Certificate of Completion
- The Sustainability for Teachers runs for 7 weeks (including an orientation period).
- We suggest you dedicate a minimum of 4 hours a week to receive maximum benefit from this programme.
- You can choose to pay in full or in instalments.
- We provide a limited number of scholarships, please apply here. Applications will be accepted until August 10th, 2023 and results will be communicated to applicants by August 17th, 2023.
- For further information, please email: email@example.com / firstname.lastname@example.org
Graduates of our programmes have gone on to contribute to sustainability projects, build communities, become social entrepreneurs, partake in permaculture projects and bio-dynamic farming, support transition movements and much more.
The most important thing that is required from each one, is to keep an open mind, a learner’s mind, and apply it with gentleness and sincerity to all the communication that will take place in the course. There will be work in pairs, team work, forum discussions, giving and receiving feedback, and everyone is invited to be both frank and kind, keeping an awareness that there are multiple perspectives, cultural backgrounds, styles of writing and levels of English.
In order to get the course completion certificate, you will be required to:
- Post reflections for at least 4 out of the 6 modules where you’re invited to reflect;
- Be present at the live online team meeting with your teaching scenario team and the facilitator in module 4;
- Actively engage in writing your teaching activity up until the final version with incorporated feedback.