Sphere: Searching and Researching for Sustainability Education in the Public City

description

http://blogs.eciad.ca/elverum/category/research/

Duane Elverum is Assistant Professor in Foundation and Design at Emily Carr University, where his teaching and research promotes an ongoing conversation involving some of our most challenging questions: 1) How is it that the net sum of human imagination manifests itself as an unquestioned reliance on industrial systems and patterns of consumption that knowingly contribute to the ongoing decline of living systems? 2) In a time of multiple and complex social and environmental challenges, what is the relationship between education and civil engagement?

As a sustainability educator teaching university students, his work examines how universities can examine these issues, and the role they may have in preparing students to participate in a life that promises to be somewhat different than the one we are living now. He proposes in curriculum and research that universities can participate by creating immersive project-based, collaborative and dialogic learning models that are trans-disciplinary and oriented toward civil engagement.