The school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.
- John Dewey
To change ideas about the land is for is to change ideas about what anything is for.
- Aldo Leopold
Project Overview
The Sustainable Schools Project aims to prepare schools and their communities for the future by re-imagining and re-designing classroom, school, and community ecologies to be contributors to abundance, health, vitality, and long-term durability. We seek to empower individual schools and districts to play an active role in evaluating their local needs and resources and developing projects and priorities for sustainable practices as part of classroom curricular activities.
The Sustainable Schools Project is grounded in the belief that schools can design and use applied curriculum to deliver:
• Integrated Systems for successful low-energy living:
• Food & Water & Low/Zero Waste Systems
• Green Construction, Facilities, and Materials & Appropriate Technologies
• Biodiverse Internal and External School Landscapes, Healthy Settings in All Aspects
• Sustainable Economic Systems
• Cooperative Teaching & Learning & Living Systems
The Sustainable Schools Project addresses:
• Organizing principles for transforming our school ecologies
• Resource abundance
• Economic stability & flexibility
• Ecological design
• Curricular relevancy (for schools and communities)
• Promoting and protecting cultural democracy
• Enriched and revitalized learning in all dimensions of human potential and fulfillment
• Bridging Classroom and Community
• Building a learning community
Stages and Phases of Educational Development
The project guides schools and districts to review and revise their practices in terms of their environmental impact. This work is done through seasonal retreats, on-site consultations, curriculum development, implementation and assessment, resource development, and other professional learning and community building activities.
The project will assess the school's sustainability practices and ecological footprint by engaging educators, school staff, students, community and operations at curricular and practical levels. Using school curriculum to effect school change, teachers and students will work to initiate a series of planning steps and evaluations, aimed at finding authentic and meaningful ways to raising awareness, building knowledge and fostering engagement that build scholarship, citizenship and stewardship.
The process is democratic, participatory, critical and whole systems-minded, and inclusive of local and cultural perspectives. Our approach speaks of nested ecologies rather than a single ecology of anything. Any single ecology is multi-part in nature and internally indivisible so that longevity and reproduction is ensured. The essential elements are physical, bio-environmental, and human-cultural.
Sustainable Schools Project Home
