Glossary

In sustainability education, the language we choose shapes not only what we say but how we think and act. Throughout this platform, we've been intentional about the terms we use, recognizing that each word carries meaning, assumptions, and possibilities. This glossary isn't about defining the "right" way to talk about sustainability education, but rather about transparency: we want to share why we've chosen certain terms and what we mean when we use them. 

Think of this as an invitation to a shared conversation. When we use specific terms, we're drawing on specific understandings that shape our approach. By making these choices visible, we hope to create clarity and openness — so we can all engage with these ideas from a common foundation, even as we each bring our own interpretations and contexts to the work. 

Context: In sustainability education, context refers to the specific places, communities, professional domains, and systems where sustainability challenges manifest and where action becomes possible. It's the difference between understanding climate change as an abstract global phenomenon and recognizing how it shows up in your local food system, your city's infrastructure, or your professional field. 

When we talk about context, we're inviting students to ground their learning in the particular realities they inhabit and will help shape. 

Consciousness, as we use it here, means becoming aware of how we are connected to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us, and how this awareness shapes our role in addressing sustainability challenges. It's more than simply knowing about climate issues, it's about exploring our relationship with those issues and our positioning within them.  

It's an invitation to move beyond consuming information toward genuine engagement with their own evolving identity as agents of change. This is deeply personal work. Consciousness develops when students encounter diverse perspectives and recognize that people hold different views rooted in different lived experiences, values, and identities. 

Education as sustainability: Stephen Sterling, a leading scholar in sustainability education, helps clarify what education as sustainability can mean in practice by distinguishing three levels (Sterling, 2014): 

1. Education about sustainable development: Teaching students about environmental issues, climate science, and sustainability concepts. This adds sustainability as a topic but doesn't fundamentally change how education works.
2. Education for sustainable development: Preparing students with skills and knowledge to contribute to sustainability in their professional lives. This is useful but still positions students as adapting to existing systems rather than transforming them.
3. Education as sustainable development: Using education itself as a process of transformation. Here, learning contributes to re-evaluating the norms that guide current systems, through experiences that enable students to develop agency, question assumptions, and imagine alternatives. 

Educational material: We chose the term "educational material" deliberately to signal flexibility and possibility. Unlike "workshop" (which implies a specific format or time commitment) or "toolkit" (which suggests a fixed set of steps to follow), educational material emphasizes adaptability and inspiration. 

Educational materials encompass any resources designed to support learning processes. They can include activities, prompts, frameworks, examples, or provocations that educators shape according to their specific context (Tomlinson, 2017). 

Transformative skills and competencies: they are those that fundamentally shift how learners see themselves and their relationship to the world. Rather than simply acquiring knowledge, students develop capacities that enable them to critically question assumptions, navigate complexity, and act as agents of positive change in addressing sustainability challenges. 

This approach builds on the work of scholars like Jack Mezirow, whose transformative learning theory emphasizes how adults learn through critical reflection and perspective transformation (Mezirow, 1997), and Gert Biesta, who challenges educators to think beyond learning as acquisition toward education as formation, shaping who students become, not just what they know (Biesta, 2010). The OECD's Learning Compass 2030 framework similarly identifies transformative competencies as essential for navigating uncertainty and creating a sustainable future, emphasizing student agency, anticipation, and responsibility (OECD, 2019). 

Frameworks like the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) further articulate what these competencies look like in practice, organizing them around five dimensions: being (relationship with self), thinking (cognitive skills), relating (caring for others), collaborating (social skills), and acting (driving change). Core competencies include creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, empathy, resilience, and responsibility, capacities that enable students to address complex global challenges like climate change and inequality.