<p> This research tells a story about how students form communities of practice that help them succeed in graduate school. Told within the context of individual and collective experiences, it holds valuable lessons for how student success can be supported across the higher education landscape. Communities of practice can develop spontaneously when individuals involved in a common activity or with a sense of shared identity come together to deal with organizational complexities or establish a forum for continued learning. The practice of becoming an accomplished and successful student who is able to develop scholarly abilities and deepen disciplinary understanding, experience personal growth and achievement, while at the same time maintaining a healthy school-work-life balance is a non-trivial exercise. Membership in a community of practice can help students achieve success as part of the process of navigating this complex journey. Generously informed by the experiences of Prescott College sustainability education doctoral students, this research used survey responses, anecdote circles, interviews, and grounded theory methods to determine how communities of practice develop among graduate students in support of their success. This presentation asks and answers questions about what communities of practice are, how and why they develop, and what value they can bring to higher education. </p><p> <i>Keywords</i>: student success, community of practice, graduate education, sustainability education, sustainable education, higher education </p>

This study began by questioning pedagogical approaches to sustainability and scrutinizing the paradigmatic assumptions inherent to those approaches. The following text focuses the investigation of a means through which students might be educated not about sustainability, but in sustainability. Differentiating between the two calls into question the ideological categorization – e.g., separate ecological and social perspectives – that has resulted from dominant sustainability paradigms. The essence of these paradigms discloses a common interest in the consequences of human action, a finding which suggests (a) that sustainability and sustainability education ought to be primarily concerned with considering the past and potential consequences of a specific action, and (b) that this is best accomplished by assembling the perspectives of those affected by the consequences, and those who might be able to expound upon those perspectives. Using an architectural study abroad program as point of intervention, critical communication pedagogy is considered for its potential to assemble and examine multiple perspectives and enhance the overall effectiveness of sustainability education. / text

<p>Given the threats of climate change along with limited natural resources, colleges and universities are in a position to role model sustainable practices and provide opportunities for students to learn how to live more sustainable lives. Campus housing departments are well positioned to implement sustainability education programs for their residential students. Residential college students are often less motivated to engage in sustainable living behaviors because they perceive minimal control over their living environment and are not held accountable for their resource consumption. This study evaluated the effect the No Impact Jack Sustainable Living Certificate program had on promoting and sustaining behavior change in residential college students. The program design applied the theory of planned behavior, which uses reported behavioral beliefs, normative beliefs, and control beliefs to predict behavioral intention for performing the target behaviors. This study identified barriers and motivations for engaging in sustainable living behaviors, as perceived by first year residential students, alongside the testing of certain Community Based Social Marketing strategies including public commitment, social norms, and incentives. The No Impact Jack program was most successful in helping participants maintain their current behaviors and affirming their motivations for engaging in sustainable behaviors in the context of a new and slightly more challenging living environment. Those who participated in the No Impact Jack program were less susceptible than the other research participants to the perceived barriers (control beliefs) encountered in this new environment. Participation in the No Impact Jack program helped them learn more about sustainable living behaviors in the college environment and the certificate on the door provided additional motivation for holding themselves accountable to the commitment they made. The results provided direction on what type of education and programmatic outreach to provide to residential college students in order to facilitate and maintain desired behavior changes. </p>

<p> Resource consumption continues to increase as the population grows. In order to secure a sustainable future, society must educate the next generation to become "sustainability natives." Schools play a pivotal role in educating a sustainability-literate society. However, a disconnect exists between the hidden curriculum of the built environment and the enacted curriculum. This study employs a transformative participatory professional development model to instruct teachers on how to use their school grounds as teaching tools for the purpose of helping students make explicit choices in energy consumption, materials use, and sustainable living. </p><p> Incorporating a phenomenological perspective, this study considers the lived experience of two sustainability coordinators. Grounded theory provides an interpretational context for the participants' interactions with each other and the professional development process. Through a year long professional development experience - commencing with an intense, participatory two-day workshop -the participants discussed challenges they faced with integrating facilities into school curriculum and institutionalizing a culture of sustainability. </p><p> Two major needs were identified in this study. For successful sustainability initiatives, a hybrid model that melds top-down and bottom-up approaches offers the requisite mix of administrative support, ground level buy-in, and excitement vis-&agrave;-vis sustainability. Second, related to this hybrid approach, K-12 sustainability coordinators ideally need administrative capabilities with access to decision making, while remaining connected to students in a meaningful way, either directly in the classroom, as a mentor, or through work with student groups and projects.</p>

<p> The number of colleges and universities with campus agriculture projects in the US has grown from an estimated 23 in 1992 to 300 today with possibly increased numbers predicted. The profile emerging from campus agriculture projects looks a lot different from the traditional land grant colleges of agriculture. In spite of this emergent trend and staunch advocacy for campus agriculture projects, limited empirical research on agriculture-based learning in higher education exists outside agriculture degrees and theoretical work of scholars such as Liberty Hyde Bailey and David Orr. The purpose of this exploratory research was two-fold. First, prevailing characteristics and pedagogical objectives of campus agriculture projects were explored through a survey of all known US campus agriculture project managers and educators. Second, interviews, photo-elicitation, field observations, and use of the Connectedness to Nature Scale and Inclusion of Nature Scale were conducted during the summer of 2013 at Yale Farm and the University of Montana's Program in Ecological Agriculture and Society Farm (P.E.A.S.). At these two farms, I studied whether and in what ways did academic courses connected to campus agriculture projects at US colleges impact participating students' perceptions of and connection to nature. </p><p> This mixed methods research illustrates a re-visioning of how higher education is interfacing with agriculture and agriculture-based education beyond traditional land grant colleges of agriculture through attention to sustainability initiatives and pedagogies. Agriculture-based education and campus agriculture projects can distinctively impact students' perceptions of connectedness to nature through experiencing agriculture's role in establishing a new worldview. Data offers empirical evidence that campus agriculture projects deepen connection to place, and offers substitutes to anthropocentric beliefs and behaviors. While experiences at the campus agriculture projects motivated pro-environmental and social behaviors specific to farming, food, and the more-than-human community at the farms, participating students did not report an increase in cognitive connectedness to nature or behaviors beyond food, farming, or the more-than-human community at the farms.</p>

This research sets out to establish both the extent to which and the ways in which English Secondary schools have a school culture focusing upon sustainability. I visited three case study schools for six weeks each: these were carefully selected to represent a range of progress towards becoming sustainable schools. I visited two other ‘benchmark’ schools for two days each: these were chosen on the recommendations of school sustainability experts, and visiting them helped me judge the progress my case-study schools had made. I took an ethnographic approach to the research, conducting about 80 interviews with various members of my three case study schools, also consulting school documents and undertaking observations of lessons and other aspects of school life. I discovered that the case-study schools had generally made little progress on sustainability, with most school members unaware or uncertain of the basic principles of sustainability. The schools focused much more on students’ examination results and behaviour than sustainability. Leadership structures and formal student involvement in leadership at the case study schools were not conducive to sustainability. Links between campus operations and the taught curriculum were mostly absent, and where sustainability was included in lessons, it tended to be largely theoretical, with few references to its impact on the students and daily life. In the light of the case-study findings and a wide-ranging literature review, a series of recommendations are made, both for secondary schools and for national education policy. These relate, for example, to patterns of school leadership, to the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) of school leaders and teachers, to strengthening the role of sustainability in both the formal and informal curriculum, and to ensuring that students emerge better equipped for a world in which sustainability agendas will be of increasing importance.

The focus of this research is the life story of Merve Wilkinson whose practice as ecoforester and educator sustains and promotes ecological knowledge and responsibility. Using the method of narrative inquiry I explore Wilkinson's meanings, self-understandings, influences, actions and values as he reflected on the development of his sustainability philosophy, his practice of sustainability education, and his vision of education for the future. This research documents his education philosophy that shows insight into the meanings, structures and essences of sustainability education. Four key areas of reform in education emerged: early childhood personal experience with nature to nurture the sense of wonder, caring for nature, and connection with the natural world; adults/teachers share with their students their knowledge, feelings, and actions that demonstrate responsible environmental behaviours; the wisdom of historical knowledge and practical skills is honoured; a long-range vision is developed that integrates environmental values with a tradition of democratic participation.

<p>In light of the increasingly complex sustainability problems facing local and global communities, and the need to improve the scientific basis for decision making, sustainability science elevates the role of research collaborations and communication among scientists and stakeholders in developing solutions. Although many universities are heeding the calls for collaborative research and are making progress on bringing diverse groups together to address sustainability issues, disconnections between the production of knowledge and its actual use in society persist. These persistent divisions indicate that we still have a great deal to learn about how to develop university-stakeholder partnerships that facilitate collaboration between the various actors in society. </p><p> Building successful, enduring research partnerships is essential for improving links between knowledge and action. The overarching question addressed in this dissertation is: <i>"In the quest to develop sustainable solutions, what factors may strengthen or hinder the development of robust stakeholder-university research partnerships?"</i> In answering this question, I interrogate the role of communication in partnership development, the influence of communication practices on stakeholder and researcher interactions, and ways that we can use interdisciplinary forms of and approaches to research to improve communication with partners. The goal of this research is to improve university and community capacity for collaborative, problem-focused research to address pressing societal problems. </p><p> Using quantitative and qualitative survey data from the <i>Maine Municipal Official Survey</i> and the <i>Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement Survey,</i> each chapter addresses the overarching research question in different ways. In the first and second chapters, I develop theoretically and empirically supported statistical models to identify a set of factors influencing officials' reported interest in developing a community-university research partnership and factors influencing officials' participation preferences in community-university research partnerships, respectively. The models strengthen the capacity for co-learning by providing data on interest and preference alignment between potential project partners, and they provide data on stakeholder preferences and experiences that may improve communication between partners and inform partnership interactions. The third chapter bridges interdisciplinary theories from social psychology and communication to deepen the conversation about justice in community-university research partnerships. The dissertation concludes with lessons learned about developing community-university research partnerships. </p>

<p> Understanding the factors which influence adopting sustainability practices in IHE is an important issue to develop more effective sustainability's methods and policies. The focus of this research is to find out a meaningful relationship between adopting sustainability practices and some of the characteristics of institutions of higher education (IHE). IHE can be considered as the best place to promote sustainability and develop the culture of sustainability in society. Thus, this research is conducted to help developing sustainability in IHE which have significant direct and indirect impact on society and the environment. </p><p> First, the sustainability letter grades were derived from "Greenreportcard.org" which have been produced based on an evaluation of each school in nine main categories including: Administration, Climate Change &amp; Energy, Food &amp; Recycling, etc. In the next step, the characteristics of IHE as explanatory variables were chosen from "The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System" (IPEDS) and respective database was implemented in STATA Software. Finally, the "ordered-Probit Model" is used through STATA to analyze the impact of some IHE's factor on adopting sustainability practices on campus. </p><p> The results of this analysis indicate that variables related to "Financial support" category are the most influential factors in determining the sustainability status of the university. "The university features" with two significant variables for "Selectivity" and "Top 50 LA" can be classified as the second influential category in this table, although the "Student influence" is also eligible to be ranked as the second important factor. Finally, the "Location feature" of university was determined with the least influential impact on the sustainability of campuses.</p>

With an introduction to the Sustainability Challenge and Sustainable Development this paper discusses the role of education as an important strategy in the transition towards sustainability. It argues that Sustainability Education (SE) should be infused into the curricula, especially at the adolescence stage. The research uses the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development as an approach for backcasting from the envisioned future: the ideal secondary school graduate equipped to meet the Sustainability Challenge.By conducting a meta-analysis of literature, the research develops the Criteria for Analysing Sustainability Education (CASE). In terms of Knowledge, it advises developing awareness of Sustainable Development, Economy, Environment and Society. With regard to Skills, it includes Cognitive Thinking Skills, Practical and Functional Skills, and Interpersonal Skills. In relation to Attitudes, it comprises Attitudes about Self and Attitudes about People and Planet.The paper then evaluates the International Baccalaureate (IB) Programme, using the CASE and interviews with practitioners, with focus on curriculum design of the Middle Years Programme, Diploma Programme, and Learner Profile. It concludes that the IB generally aligns with the criteria for quality SE, but some gaps exist. The paper suggests recommendations that can further improve the IB with regard to SE.