Sustainability Education Across Learning Environments with Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers

Many people associate the word “sustainability” with a few specific activities such as composting or recycling. Our guests for this episode, Dr. Liz-Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers, point out that sustainability is actually much broader, encompassing all the future-oriented practices that promote the continued flourishing of individuals, cultures, and life on earth. Dr. Potter-Nelson and Meyers have sought not only to make education a tool for sustainability but to make it a sustainable activity itself. In this episode, they describe how they created the Sustainability and Climate Change Across Learning Environments (SCALES) project, a curated repository of open-source, easily adaptable educational resources, many of them originally adapted from course materials on MIT OpenCourseWare. These resources, which are categorized according to a set of six main pedagogical approaches and six chief competency areas, draw from a surprisingly wide range of academic fields, but each was selected for its potential to support sustainability in the classroom and in the world. After all, Dr. Potter-Nelson and Meyers say, sustainability is an inherently interdisciplinary subject, one that can inform–and be informed by–teaching in nearly any field of study. Relevant Resources: MIT OpenCourseWare (https://ocw.mit.edu) The OCW Educator Portal (https://ocw.mit.edu/educator) Dr. Potter-Nelson’s website (https://lizpotternelson.com/) Sarah Meyers at MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (https://environmentalsolutions.mit.edu/people/sarah-meyers/) Teaching with Sustainability resource on OpenCourseWare (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/res-env-006-teaching-with-sustainability-january-iap-2022/) The SCALES Project (https://scales.mit.edu/) Dr. Potter-Nelson’s white paper on sustainability education (https://environmentalsolutions.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Intro-to-sustainability-education-white-paper.pdf) United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals) Musi