Through pedagogical narratives, literary analyses, reflective essays, and collaborative dialogues, Narratives of Educating for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments explores the professional and intellectual tensions of curricula, pedagogies, and personal practices that honor the relationships of interspecies ecologies, reinhabit and reconceive wounded landscapes and wounding institutions, and allow us to reattune ourselves to new yet ancient frameworks for sustainability. For the writers here, fostering sustainability in higher education means focusing on place, creating positive relationships with humans and other beings, and creating administrative structures that will maintain new approaches for the long-term, showing how teaching environmentally is at once intensely site-specific yet powerfully global, deeply personal yet visibly public. Narratives of Educating for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments confronts the contexts that make environmental pedagogies difficult, the challenges to the well-being of the teacher-scholar, and the corrosive academic structures that compartmentalize knowledge and people. The collection simultaneously offers models for working through and within these challenges to advance understandings and ways of being on local, global, and personal levels that will turn the planetary tide toward effective and shared sustainability.
Acknowledgments
Preface
PART 1. Confronting the Challenges of the Places We Are
Unrooted: Dislocation and the Teaching of Place, Jennifer L. Case 17 By the Lumbee River with Chad Locklear’s “Swamp Posse,” Jane Haladay and Scott Hicks
Getting Your Feet Wet: Teaching Climate Change at Ground Zero, Daniel Spoth
Cutting through the Smog: Teaching Mountaintop Removal at a University Powered by Coal, Brianna R. Burke
Teaching about Biodiversity and Extinction in a Thawing Alaska: A Reflection, Jennifer Schell
PART 2. Rethinking What We Do, Remaking Curricular Ecologies
Letting the Sheets of Memory Blow on the Line: Phantom Limbs, World-Ends, and the Unremembered, Derek Owens
Student Expectations, Disciplinary Boundaries, and Competing Narratives in a First-Year Sustainability Cohort, Corey Taylor, Richard House, and Mark Minster
Connecting Urban Students to Conservation through Recovery Plans for Endangered Species, Andrea Olive
Teaching Critical Food Studies in Rural North Carolina, Keely Byars-Nichols
PART 3. Reinhabiting and Restoring Who and Where We Are
Mindfulness, Sustainability, and the Power of Personal Practice, Jesse Curran
Ecological Journeys: From Higher Education to the Old Farm Trail, Barbara George
Meeting across Ontologies: Grappling with an Ethics of Care in Our Human-More-than-Human Collaborative Work, Bawaka Country, including Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Kate Lloyd, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, and Paul Hodge
Ganawendamaw: Anishinaabe Concepts of Sustainability, Margaret Noodin
Epilogue
Contributors
Index
