Students Designing Sustainability Literacy and Systemic Change Agent Leadership Curricula: An Interconnected Web Approach at Portland State University

摘要

Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) recognize that there are many challenges to integrating sustainability into curriculum, including the large scale of the challenge itself, the existence of multiple curricula, creating connections between traditionally siloed disciplines, and the diverse types of postsecondary education institutions, but the deeper challenge "is that the existing curriculum in higher education has not been developed to examine how we shape a sustainable world" (p. 2). Examiningand transforming the processes through which a sustainable world is envisioned and adapted is critical for sustainability literacy. According to The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World, edited by Arran Stibbe, "as people gain sustainability literacy skills, they become empowered to read self and society critically, to discover insights into the trajectory of society and to envisage where it is heading. They gain skills in re-writing self and society both in an effort to meet needs under increasingly difficult conditions and also to work towards new paths that lead to a more sustainable world" (p. 3). Sustainability literacy, therefore, is inherently acquired through the practice of change agent leadership. Reviewing several models of sustainability education learning outcomes, the following have been distilled to reflect the broad perspective of competencies of a sustainability change agent leader.