Teaching Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences

The essays in this volume represent grassroots restoration work in higher education for sustainability. Over the last five years, faculty in the humanities and social sciences at a wide range of institutions across North America have individually and together begun to do what David Orr called for in the 1990s in Earth in Mind. They have gone back to their respective disciplines and, with intellectual agility, courage, and a sense of adventure and responsibility, begun to rethink old assumptions, ask the big questions, and readjust their own narratives about what it means to educate, to learn, and to know - with the challenges of sustainability in mind. Sustainability educators have had to engage entirely new disciplines, work closely with non-academic institutional and community partners, take pedagogical risks, invent new courses and entirely reconfigure old ones, and learn anew how to draw on cultural wisdom from their own experience and disciplinary training. They have inspired, cajoled, and tended individual change, institutional change, and social change. They have come together in conferences, working groups, and networks to reflect on pedagogical theory, learning outcomes, and assessment for sustainability. The main purpose of this volume is to provide a snapshot of this curricular restoration for sustainability within U.S. higher education.