Rethinking education

Karen Herland

This term, students had an opportunity to experience sustainability as a practice as well as a philosophy in the classroom.

“This course has meaning. You are not just pulling out a textbook. You can change Concordia, you can change the world,” said David Falconar, summing up his experience with GEOG 398.

The course, offered through the Geography, Planning and Environment Department, offers students the opportunity to focus on a real-life sustainability problem in the university. Students work with an appropriate staff person, faculty member or administrator to determine the parameters of the problem, the best course of action to deal with it, and the steps to address it.

The course combines the hands-on work with seminar-style classes on subjects like skills-building, social marketing and consensus decision-making. According to Lindsay Cole, the instructor for the course, “the way people learn is as important as what they learn.” Cole said students from a variety of disciplines take the course, bringing different knowledge levels, experience and backgrounds.

“I was able to identify a problem and a project that would be applied and was relevant to my life,” said Blake Saucier-Curtis. “We weren’t just talking about sustainability, we were experiencing it.”

For Julie Beaudin, understanding ways to become more engaged was revelatory. In one exercise, students identified a problem and solutions and determined which administrator, politician or decision-maker to target with their request. They then wrote a letter explaining the problem and recommending changes.

“This course should be mandatory,” Beaudin said. “I thought sustainability was just about the environment. I didn’t know about the three pillars (ecological, economic and social).”

Saucier-Curtis agrees about the importance of the course as an opportunity to challenge traditional learning models, and to identify directly tangible results.

Beaudin worked with Falconar on determining ways to get students more involved in decision-making on campus. “Students don’t get engaged enough in school,” she said. “They come to school for their classes so they can graduate and get into the job market.” Her research concluded that giving students a role in decision-making is an incentive for them to get more involved.

Beaudin reels off a list of results from her research. “There should be orientations where students can meet the senior administrators. Many of them don’t even know who the president is. There should be ways students can get involved in determining where the money goes and how the university budgets are designed.”

Marie-Claude Blanchet examined ways that sustainability could be integrated into the JMSB curriculum. “That faculty needs it more than the others. ”

Blanchet identified sustainable business courses at other universities, and discovered that Concordia is behind McGill, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, HEC and Université de Montréal. In some cases, the courses are part of the core curriculum. “We have to catch up with other universities.”

Blanchet, who has already identified an instructor at JMSB willing to teach the course, said her project will not end with a final report. “I’m not quitting until it goes through. This course changes you, and sustainability is about change.”

Cole has been teaching courses on sustainability since completing her MA at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C. Her thesis work established a framework for performing a sustainability audit that became the basis for the first audit performed at Concordia in 2002. She is also a director with the Sustainability Solutions Group.