2016 Annual Conference

Facilitating the development of sustainability mindsets in our learners is an emerging task for adult educators in many fields. This session explores the development of learners’ multifaceted concepts about sustainability and their expanding and emerging roles in creating sustainable societies.

This session will be of value to individuals with a focus or interest in sustainability education, environmental education, adult development, perspective transformation and professional development.

One of the key elements in creating a sustainable society is a population of citizens who have a solid understanding of the concept of sustainability and the ability to envision solutions to current and future problems. This session examines research into the changing conceptions of learners with regard to their ideas about sustainability and their role in creating sustainable societies. The learners in the study were participants in an undergraduate research program focused on sustainable energy. The examination will be grounded in the literature of education for sustainability, transformative learning for planetary perspectives, and situated learning, and will focus on highlighting the common threads that support the development of new generations of scientists and engineers with sustainable mindsets. It will explore how learners’ concepts of sustainability were broadened from narrow, discipline specific definitions to an understanding of sustainability as a multidisciplinary field. It will discuss learners’ developing identities from budding scientists and engineers to citizens invested in and capable of creating sustainable societies. Program elements and learning techniques that contributed to these conceptual and perspective changes will be shared.