Thomas Everth is a teacher and researcher, currently completing his PhD on climate change education at the University of Waikato. He has created and generously shared this textbook template, so other teachers can adapt it for use with their students.
This is a great example of co-creation of content, empowering students to take the lead and explore areas that most interest them. It also recognises that knowledge and perspectives will vary across contexts and places.
Resource overview:
This textbook for students of Education for Sustainability (EfS) courses at Level 2 and Level 3 of the curriculum was generated for the purpose of teaching a mixed L2/L3 class of students in a distance learning program in 2022.
While there are many excellent resources for EfS teaching, what seemed to be missing was a textbook that draws key concepts of sustainability thinking together into a coherent framework that allows students to develop a coherent understanding of sustainability theory at the appropriate level.
This textbook is therefore a skeleton book at present and will be written by the students and edited by the teacher as the course progresses.
There is no intention to publish a completed copy of the textbook because doing so would defeat the pedagogy of the template idea. Students need to think for themselves and build a narrative based on the resources they utilise and the discussions in the classroom amongst their peers, under the guidance of the teacher. Publishing a completed textbook would return students to the knowledge consumption and repetition mode instead of leading them to a space of active construction of knowledge.
Click on the link provided above to open the document, which can then be downloaded as a PDF or Word document.
Find out more about Thomas and his research here.
