‘Radically different learning’: implementing sustainability pedagogy in a university peer mentor program

Abstract

Sustainability education is a growing field within higher education that fosters personal and intellectual engagement with the interconnected tensions of pressing social, ecological, economic, and political issues. Sustainability education aims to prepare learners to become creative problem solvers and active citizens who understand the relationships between and leverage points within complex systems. However, little research has been done to identify how to teach sustainability effectively in ways that prepare emerging leaders to address these complex problems. This paper provides an overview of an action research study that implemented the Burns model of sustainability pedagogy to embed sustainability into a university course on peer mentoring. Results show that implementing this model in the design and teaching of the course changed emerging educators' understanding of sustainability by making it more multidimensional, and that students gained an critical theory perspective of sustainability which they applied to their own educational experiences.