Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Narrator: In our modern society, separateness is pervasive, separation between pedestrians and cars, urban and rule, cities and ecosystems, poverty and luxury, formality and informality, humans and animals. Our educational system is a reflection of this disconnectedness. The linear construction of our educational system segregates students into rigid disciplines and alienates them from the real world. In reality, separateness is an illusion.

Bob Doppelt: The boundaries we create to distinguish ourselves from other people, our organizations from other organizations, humans from the so called natural environment, somehow we believe there’s us, and then there’s the natural environment out there. These are illusions. They’re not real. Those are just illusions, and it’s helpful illusions for us humans, and what we’re trying to do is to break the world down into smaller pieces, so we can understand it better and hopefully control it, although, often we find out we don’t control it very well, so it’s a natural process, but don’t ever lose the fact that it’s an illusion.

Narrator: This illusion of separation exists in our minds. Sustainability is about bridging this gap and overcoming the illusion of separateness. We can achieve this by making systems thinking second nature.

Dr. Michael Crow: How many think that the United States is going through a period of social change in the last 50 years, the last 10 years? It’s unbelievable, and do you think we should ignore those things at the university or pay attention to them? Well we might not embrace them, but we certainly have to be aware of them.

Narrator: This begs the question, are schools and universities providing opportunities for students to build these bridges for themselves? How can we change our education system to incorporate sustainability and overcome this paradigm of separateness? The good news is that education institutions nationwide are transitioning towards incorporating sustainability into their academic and outreach programs. By making internal structural changes, Arizona State University is at the forefront of the sustainable transition.

Anthony Cortese: What’s really quite interesting is Michael Crow talks about the New American University, and the old American university. In a way it would be useful to talk about what the old American university looks like, and what we’re trying to do is—George had a wonderful way of saying it. You can’t be the old American university and the new American university at the same time. What he’s trying to do is move the old American University into the frame of the new one, and I have not seen any big complex university that has attempted and been successful at breaking down the barriers among the different schools and researchers than at ASU. It’s remarkable.

Sander van der Leeuw:: If you look at Tony Cortese’s assessment we have an absolute leadership role nationally. We are much further ahead, and interestingly enough, what is good about this report, he shows that we’re actually further ahead than most people at ASU even understand, including ourselves. I think we’ve done a huge lot. Many other universities look upon us very expectantly to complete that change, but are themselves afraid of starting it. It is a little bit like Bill Clark once said a long time ago, “I’d love to do what you’re doing, but I can’t because Harvard is perfect.”

Narrator: The truth is that nothing on our planet exists on its own. Everything is interconnected. In order to overcome the illusion of separateness sustainability education focuses on changing not only what we teach, but how we teach.

Dr. Michael Crow: This old model, this model, the professor at the front of the room behind the little lab platform with the chalkboard behind him, all the students in the room pretending to pay attention, this model is not gone, but it’s now probably the third or fourth most important way or most viable way to teach. We need completely differentiated approaches. We need to apply every technological tool that human beings can develop to enhance learning. People think that this learning methodology was adequate, and I would say adequate would be a good word.

Speaker: Sustainability isn’t something that you can learn straight from a textbook. It isn’t a solution that’s stated plainly in the text. It’s you piecing together different people and different pieces and different knowledge, so that you as a person can make the best decision, and it’s all on you to make that right decision to make sure that everybody is happy and everybody is healthy.

Narrator: In order to establish K through 12 students as the leaders of tomorrow and agents of change we need to bridge the gap between secondary and higher education.

George Dyer: By the time students get to college it’s too late in terms of their patterns of thinking around issues related to sustainability, and so that really needs to come earlier.

Narrator: Creating an interdisciplinary system at the university level will allow for a less rigid system at the K through 12 level.

Speaker: I think it better prepared me because a lot of the stuff that I learned I was almost ahead of the learning curve.

Speaker: I feel like it—I didn’t accumulate anything in high school to get to where I am now.

Speaker: One thing I remember, they taught me how to think critically I guess.

Speaker: I really didn’t like high school that much. The teachers just didn’t really care, and I guess that’s what you get with public education. It was like kids getting good grades for no reason, not really doing any work, literally doing nothing. The difference between honors and regular, it’s so dumb how, “Oh, I'm in an AP class, and I'm failing, but this kid in a regular class is learning nothing, and they’re getting an A.”

Speaker: Yeah. My high school was useless for that. They taught me very little. I had one good Russian literature class and that was about it.

Speaker: I think high school helps you get to a certain point, but at the same time I didn’t know I had to work. I worked way harder in high school than I needed to, so I wish I would have known maybe not to have done that, but I'm glad I did.

Speaker: I think for me it did a little bit. I think it can to an extent. If I wanted to have it prepared for me, then it really could have helped.

Narrator: Embedding sustainability into education requires a change in structure and in teaching methods, not only at the higher education level, but also in the K through 12 sector.

Dr. Michael Crow: New teacher, new learner, we’re not producing—we’re not selecting the right folks to become teachers at the K through 12 level. We’re not advancing them in the right way. We’re not advancing them with the right tools. We’re not advancing them with the right dynamics. Now that doesn’t mean that we’re not producing good solid individuals as teachers. It’s just that we are not succeeding. It is pretty much the consensus of many economists that for the United States economy to be successfully everyone has to graduate from a 21st century high school curriculum for our economy to be more competitive and more effective, not every kid through college, every kid, every person from every family through high school. We are not equipped to do that. We are not equipped to do that.

Narrator: Sustainability teachers empower students as change agents and problem solvers.

Andrew Bernier: Most modern public K12 schools are run on what would be known as an industrial model. Sustainability embraces the concept of technology and engineering and biotechnology and energy innovation and research specifically, but more importantly, it takes on the challenges of today. I mean when was the last time you got a class in climate change? When was the last time you got a class in health inequity? When was the last time you got a class in understanding population dynamics? Sustainability is taking on the challenges of today by using the examples of what’s happening right now.

Narrator: Sustainability education works towards providing a learning environment that encourages curiosity and information seeking about sustainability issues and solutions.

Annie Warren: Getting young students, we’re talking about K through 8 here, young students just aware of these problems, so when they go into their secondary—their freshman and senior years, and then think about becoming a college student or thinking about going to graduate school, they can see and interweave sustainability topics in all the elements they do in their life.

Lee Hartwell: We no longer need become domain experts, and education has been, in the past, trying to stuff enough information in so you know an area, and can perform as an expert and recall facts and procedures, and that’s just no longer necessary cuz the information is freely available whenever you need it, and we’re seeing the bright young kids able to move from one arena to another and solve problems, and so the issue is much more about understanding problems, sizing them up, thinking about the complexity and the systems nature of things, understanding what data means, particularly asking questions, asking your own questions, and seeking the answers to those questions, and following the path that your natural curiosity leads you.

Austin Morse: Sustainability allows me to think, I mean about ideas that matter, and it gives me the awareness of what’s going on in our world, and it allows me to participate in engineering, biotechnology, and learn about different things such as biology and other forms of labs.

Narrator: Changes in education go hand-in-hand with changes in society.

Sander van der Leeuw:: I see the changes that have to happen in K through 12 not only as fundamental for the completion of ASU’s trajectory. I see it as fundamental for this country, and I see it as fundamental for the world.

Anthony Cortese: We are really trying to disrupt in a positive way. We’re trying to disrupt the current way of thinking because the current way of thinking is not leading us down a healthy, just and sustainable path, so in essence, we’re there to try to help the people inside these institutions to rethink the way they teach, the way they operate and the values.

Narrator: Arizona State University, a research university with the largest undergraduate enrollment of public universities in the country is at the forefront of this sustainability transition.

Allie: Not only does the New American University really encourage us to do well in academics and pursue our goals, but it also it challenges us. It really gets us to think about what we’re here for, what our purpose is, what can we do in the community to make it different and by challenging us to make that difference we really shoot higher and aim for those goals.

Kaitlyn: We give organizations in Phoenix access to the student body, to the passion and the enthusiasm and the innovative spirits of the students at ASU, and together they collaborate to address some of the challenges that the organizations face.

Regina: Students definitely are more interconnected, and are more aware of the issues that are going on around us, and are tired of those issues, and want to create change.

Allie: That really benefits that student body because as we’re making those changes and impacting our community, it also is benefiting ourselves too because we feel that joy, and feel like we’re really doing something out there to make a difference in the world.

Narrator: ASU has incorporated sustainability as part of its identity as the new American university. These changes have happened across the university at four different levels, bridging the gap with the outside world, both internally and externally.

Anthony Cortese: The ability to breakdown the silos around big interdisciplinary research projects I think is second to none that I've seen in any of the big research universities. What the Global Institute of Sustainability, if it’s done nothing else, the ability to get—to create a space, intellectual space, physical space, the support for scholars from all these different disciplines to actually focus on research projects that are really useful to society is huge.

A third piece that’s really exciting is it’s Michael’s idea, Michael Crow’s idea of use inspire research, that the research that we’re doing, it’s not that you’re not doing fundamental research. We need to do fundamental research, but once you have some of the fundamental research, how is the fundamental research being focused to solve society’s problems, and that I think has been enormously successfully.

First of all, ASU has done a number of what I think are really groundbreaking things. One of them is for a big research university like this, what you’ve been able to do to try to make all of your operations sustainable is head and shoulders above any other big research university, not in terms of any individual specific thing, but that you have a long term, really structured process to keep pushing that always. It’s not something that is—at a lot of other places you see some things. They’ll do a little energy efficiency. They may do a little renewable energy. They might do a little project here or there. This is really systemic.

Narrator: ASU has a large community of outreach efforts, which are aimed at improving the well being of the local community.

Anthony Cortese: Another thing that has been tremendously well respected by people outside is ASU’s focus on really trying to improve the social economic health and environmental conditions within the greater Phoenix area, that that connection by scholars and students to actually having the students work on projects like that is—there isn’t anything else that’s comparable.

Narrator: Within these outreach programs, there are a number of which are focused specifically on sustainability education in the K through 12 sector.

Andrew Bernier: The sustainability branch of CREST was originally adopted off of the major core themes of the Arizona State University School of Sustainability. These themes included water, food security, looking at materials technology, looking at energy innovation, and so we adopted some of those ideas to found our core courses, looking at elements such as pollution, climate change, population dynamics, point and nonpoint pollution, and then we have other topics. Making sure we have secure water and food, that’s an entire course in itself. Looking at energy dynamics such as the nature of electricity, looking at renewable and nonrenewable sources, the transmission of energy and also consumer use, and also materials and technology such as looking at lifecycle analysis of products, looking at how we harvest natural resources, and how do we use consumer technology and also city design as well, and so a lot of the original foundations that ASU School of Sustainability built on we have adopted and modified to fit the K12 level at CREST.

Narrator: Resistance to change is strong. There are many barriers and constraints that make the transition towards sustainability very challenging.

Sander van der Leeuw:: Most disciplines or at the principle of academic disciplines were first developed in universities in Germany in about 1850, and it was taken over very quickly in the United States, and so there is now several centuries of engrained disciplinary attitude in most universities.

Prof. Arnim Wiek: Most of the students are not really educated in trans-cultural international collaboration, right, so I mean when do you have the chance really to engage with students from another university, from another country, from another continent to build some kind of capacity in this international trans-cultural collaboration, which is critical? I mean everybody tells you, “Yeah, sustainability is such a global effort. We all need to work together,” so how much exposure? How much opportunity do you really have, prospectus? You can say disciplines, but in undergraduate education it’s not so much about academic disciplines. It’s about different perspectives. How do we approach sustainability problems and sustainability challenges from very different perspectives?

Our educational system is not very strong in building students’ capacity in really developing solution options. Everybody talks about, yeah, we need to solve actually those sustainability challenges, or at least develop strategies to meet the challenges, overcome them and create this beautiful and healthy and sustainable world we all dream about, but how do we do that?

Clark: You said that we’re advancing towards our goal of being sustainable, but it seems to me that we’re primarily focused at this point on the material sustainability of the university, our energy use and material use and so forth, and we won’t really be a sustainable university until the people that we’re dealing with, the 25,000 students we’re graduating every year, all the professional areas and so forth, are committed to helping transform their own institutions throughout their careers in a sustainable way.

Dr. Michael Crow: Yeah, Clark is bringing an important point, so we tried some years ago, this has been one of our defeats, to integrate in an ASU 101 class a sustainability module that all incoming students, transfer students and freshmen students would be a part of. Ninety-six faculty members filed a grievance against the Provost, 96 faculty members.

Annie Warren: How do you teach sustainability content to a group of teachers that already have an incredibly packed schedule, and have to teach math, and have to teach all these other skills in their day as an elementary teacher? That’s sort of a challenge, right? I mean if you want to get out, sustainability content out into the K8 sector, which is our focus, you have to be creative. It’s a conundrum. You’ve got a packed schedule. You’ve got pre-service teachers that are nervous about becoming teachers. They are anticipating an incredibly full elementary school day, so engaging them in science, sustainability science content that they can take and, or see how it can connect to other things, that’s how you win them over.

Narrator: There is a disconnect between how students learn and how students are taught. An emphasis on teacher-centered learning to acquire knowledge with no practical hands on experience does not empower students as change agents.

Sander van der Leeuw:: What we do in western education is we tell children things that we think are truths, and I think that’s fundamentally wrong because it means that children never think in terms of alternatives and choices, and I think one of the fundamental things that K through 12 education needs to start to do is very early on, get children to start thinking in terms of alternatives, and look at the consequences of actions and thereby, also choose actions based on the alternatives they see and the consequences they see of each alternative.

Narrator: K through 12 institutions face different barriers than higher education.

Anthony Cortese: Colleges and universities have much more academic freedom to think about how they construct knowledge, and how they can allow students to be taught. There is a lot of freedom, and yes, you have to get—if you’re a public university, you have to get the Board of Regents to approve, but generally, those constraints are not that serious. It’s much different at the K through 12 level. Parents, the government at the K through 12 level, the local government, the state government have a lot more to say about what is taught.

Colleges and universities, even if they’re public, they have the ability to bring in research money and a lot of philanthropic money, so that if they want to do something about transforming for example, their buildings to make them more sustainable, they have more options to do that. At the K through 12 level, it’s really very well regimented by what funds are available for what purpose, over what time, and that’s somewhat true at the higher education level for the public universities.

Andrew Bernier: The program in which is being adopted at CREST is really trying to fall in line with the state standards in that it’s not dependent on the technology available, but it’s dependent on the creativity of the students and the teachers that are in the program, and that really is becoming our major limiting factor in terms of sustainability instruction is just the ability to imagine, more importantly re-imagine a lot of what we need to teach in schools.

Narrator: Amidst the barriers there are many new and exciting opportunities emerging.

Annie Warren: ASU is the largest teacher’s college in the country, so we graduate over 1,000 teacher teachers a year, so when you’re talking about impact, here you are. I mean this is—the scale is here. We’re ready to do this. We have Michael Crow as the president of the university, who is innovative, who sees potential in projects that are going on, on campus as becoming global endeavors.

Andrew Bernier: So long as the school has the talent and the resources, not monetary or physical resources, but the talent of the staff and faculty and the will of the students, and that’s why I think sustainability, because of how relevant it is, students can actually see what sustainability is trying to get after, see it in the real world, and understand oh, this is what I need to be learning, and hopefully it’s what they want to be learning as well.

Annie Warren: You get these little startup groups like our group or Global Classroom working on things. There’s six people, and then suddenly they start growing, gaining more press, and then they become these big endeavors on campus, and I think we are just an amazing university that allows people to have an idea, test it out, and if it fails, that’s okay. It’s not a big deal, and that’s really unique. You don’t end up with that on university campuses where you can try something out, get a group of students together much like you guys, and maybe this works, maybe it doesn’t. If it did, great, and if it doesn’t, it’s no big deal. You tried something new.

Arnim Wiek/Clark: The Global Classroom is a collaborative endeavor between the School of Sustainability and the School of Life Sciences, and a couple of other faculty from across the campus, and the intention is to provide a kind of unique undergraduate education in sustainability focusing on global sustainability. The idea is to create a virtual global classroom where if the students from ASU and the students from Lavana can interact on sustainability issues, so we have students from the program Society and Biology. We have students from the business school. We have students from sustainability, and they have the opportunity in the Global Classroom to really work together.

I'm offering for instance, together with one of our graduate teaching assistants, Michael Bernstein a series of activities, a series of sessions on team building, interdisciplinary team building. How do you work really productively in interdisciplinary teams? We’re trying to build students’ capacity to really talk to each other and really try to integrate different perspectives, so what we try to do in the Global Classroom is also to say we need to shift away from just educating students on thoroughly analyzing sustainability problems, but also trying to go the next step of how do we actually develop solution options.

Narrator: The challenge here is to provide children with the needed knowledge and awareness of the world’s problems, so that they can feel empowered to change their society and make the world a better place.

Annie Warren: I think it’s getting them to see creative ways that does align to the standards, and we love to ask our students, “Okay, raise your hand. How many of you want to become a teacher because you want to make a difference?” and the whole classroom raises their hand. “How many of you want to become a teacher because you’d like summers off?” and a few people raise their hand. They’re very passionate as a group, so it’s just more of a silly question, but and then, “How many of you want to be teachers because you want to teach to the standards, and you want to help your students do really well on the standardized tests?” Nobody raises their hand, so there’s something interesting going on here.

Standards are really important. It’s a drum beat, top-down, Department of Education, but you have teachers that are passionate about helping their students see the world and become global citizens. They are passionate about that, so there’s a disconnect, so what we say to them is one teacher at a time. This is how we make a difference, and then you’ve got Washington State that has sustainability standards. They’re leading the way. Other states are developing sustainability standards that will be an overlay to next generation science standards, and so while this looks like an uphill battle, it is, but it starts with creative teachers that can see these connections that can become dynamic change agents.

Andrew Bernier: Ask a student what they think of the news, not so much what they’ve been hearing lately, but what’s the feeling that they get from it, and my students, who are 15, 16 years-old, they can’t recall a positive moment that they’ve heard from the news, and so then you start to ask them what have you heard, and you start to hear of crime. You start to hear of pollution. You hear of climate change. You hear of inequity. You hear of poverty. You hear of basically all the things that sustainability is attempting to address, and so you ask them why are they concerned about it, and oftentimes, they’ll bring up examples of family. They’ll bring up examples of things and friends in the neighborhood, in the communities.

They’ll ask questions as to why no one can hold a job, and so when you start to talk about what sustainability is getting after in terms of its—the equity of society and making sure we have economic affordability, while not compromising the integrity of ecosystems, you start to see it click because when you work with students that are that young they haven’t been crushed, if you will, by the weight of the world at this point, and so you still have that hope, the inspiration, and that will to want to take it on, but as my students are getting older, you can see as they start to understand sustainability more, and they actually start to understand the magnitude of how much work as sustainability agents that we have ahead of us, you start to see it seep in, but the actual inspiration to do more, understand that they’re young, and they have all this time to take it on, that carries them through, and it’s awesome to witness as an instructor, to know that I'm literally cultivating the answer, the solution.

Here is who is gonna fix all this, and to remind them of that too is incredibly powerful, to keep on the day-to-day because it’s not the easiest thing to teach sustainability, but it’s also not the easiest thing to first understand the magnitude of what this whole thing is trying to get at, so it’s empowering. It’s enriching, and it’s relevant for them, and that’s what keeps them going.

Narrator: Today’s children will be tomorrow’s leaders, which is why it is important to empower them with a holistic view of the world and an extensive education that will allow them to solve the future’s problems.

Sander van der Leeuw:: As long as it was in the realm of the royal society, was built on proving every step. Well in order to prove something, you can only relate the present to the past because that’s what you can see. You can’t relate the present to the future, and I think in the sustainability case, we need to actually learn for the future and not just from the past.

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