What Do They Do?

The Workshop Materials section offers a range of resources to help you run a basic level sustainability training workshop within your organisation.

 

The workshops do not instruct participants in what the specific sustainability issues are of their subject area and industry, but they do enable participants to ask the right questions; to ask what the sustainability issues of their subject area might be, to identify areas for further research and areas of current good practice. The Subject Area pages should then enable access to subject specific solutions and information.

 

Who Is It For?

It can be used for tutors and staff whatever their subject discipline/practice within a College, University or other training organisation; as part of their Continuing Professional Development (CPD) or any other form of staff training workshops. The workshops can assist tutors to identify aspects of sustainable practice to research and improve within their curricula; the workshop material itself can also be adapted and directly introduced into virtually any curricula. The workshops can also be used within virtually any business or industry training context.

The SITE offers two main workshop resources:

1) The SITE workshop itself is designed as a simple beginners guide to examining sustainability issues within existing curricula or industry. It is designed to help unpack what those sustainability issues might be and to help users prioritise issues to act upon.

2) The Carbon Reduction in Curricula page offers workshop materials designed specifically to help students and teachers begin reducing the carbon footprint of their subject of study.

There are also links to a range of similar Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) workshop resources by other organisations and individuals provided on the ESD subject area link which can be accessed here by selecting 'Other Workshop Materials'

For a more detailed explanation of the origin, scope and rationale for the SITE, read the Author's Introduction document

 

Prior Understanding

Through teaching students with these materials, the SITE developers have come to understand that, in general, most people need to have first developed an understanding, personal connection to, and appreciation of the importance of sustainability before they begin to ask questions of their chosen subject discipline or industry.

Facilitating this 'personal connection' to sustainability is a difficult process to put into a training/teaching context, each individual and each subject area will require different inputs. However, there are examples of good educational activities for this process. In an Art & Design context for instance, assignments and projects can be created which encourage the students to create artwork around the theme of their own 'carbon' footprint; teaching about sustainability issues can be woven in to the project.

Some examples of these initiatives can be found within the ESD and Case Studies pages.