EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABILITY IN THE K-12 CURRICULUM: A KEY ROLE FOR EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE

The United Nations' Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) is an international call for education at all levels to address complex and growing social, economic, and environmental problems. Although progress is being made, sustainability-related instruction is sparsely represented in K-12 schools in the United States. Challenges to implementing education for sustainability in American schools include high-stakes testing of traditional content areas, an already-crowded curriculum, low levels of awareness among educators and school administrators, and lack of teacher education in the concepts and pedagogies of sustainability.

Earth system science, with its focus on systems interactions and multi-disciplinary problem-solving, furnishes an ideal framework for the curricular integration of sustainability-related topics such as climate change, environmental degradation, declining biodiversity, the need for alternate energy sources, and water scarcity. Earth scientists and geoscience educators have a unique opportunity to provide leadership in the emerging field of sustainability education by forging substantive partnerships with colleagues from education, the social sciences and humanities, mathematics, economics, and environmental studies to provide prospective and practicing teachers with an understanding of the Earth system and of the complex interactions of natural and human systems. San José State University is exploring cross-disciplinary approaches to presenting the scientific, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability through the Bay Area Earth Science Institute (BAESI), its long-standing professional development program for teachers of grades 4-12, and a new graduate course for teachers pursuing an MA in Science Education. Sustainability topics are aligned with national and state earth science and other content standards, and educators are provided with an array of classroom resources, including student activities from existing curricula such as Facing the Future, Project Learning Tree, Project WET and Project WILD. BAESI is building an online library (www.baesi.org) of sustainability-related teaching resources.