About The Collective
What is Education for Sustainability?
EfS is an approach to teaching and learning that equips students, teachers, and school systems with the new knowledge and ways of thinking we need to achieve economic prosperity and responsible citizenship while restoring the health of the living systems upon which our lives depend.
What is The EfS Collective?
The EfS Collective is a group of scholars, researchers and practitioners who are interested in advancing Education for Sustainability (EfS). We believe that in order to accelerate and scale EfS in formal education we need to provide educators with exemplary content and tools that reflect and are aligned to the EfS Benchmarks. We want to increase the quantity of high quality EfS curricula and learning experiences, designed, delivered and assessed in schools and universities. We are building a collection of exemplary work, partners, and communities that Educate for Sustainability.
What are the EfS Benchmarks?
Education for a Sustainable Future: Benchmarks for Individual and Social Learning, released by The Journal of Sustainability Education represents the current and best thinking of forty-two scholars and practitioners of the field of Education for Sustainability. The Benchmarks embody the consensus that our field needs to demonstrate the impact of EfS and to catalyze wide spread implementation.
The EfS Benchmarks include a whole system of dynamic and interconnected elements considered essential to educating for a sustainable future: Enduring Understandings, Applied Knowledge and Actions, Higher Order Thinking Skills, Dispositions, and Authentic Place-Based Community Connections.
The EfS Collective began the process of articulating those elements and the policies and practices that support them.
What is The EfS Reservoir?
The EfS Reservoir is a multi-media repository of exemplars aligned to the EfS Benchmarks. The exemplars include quality curriculum units, courses, assessments, performance criteria, student work samples and eventually stories, interviews, discussions, images, narration and film that will illustrate the contexts and the impact of this work in schools and communities.
The EfS Reservoir serves teachers, professors, researchers, administrators, and curriculum designers by giving them developmentally appropriate “quality anchors” as they design, adapt and deliver educational experiences that prepare young people to participate in, and lead with us, the shift toward a sustainable future.
We invite you to:
Explore the EfS Benchmarks and consider their applications in your classrooms and learning spaces
Browse the collection of exemplars available in the EfS Reservoir
Share your lesson plans and learning experiences for personalized feedback from our reviewers
EfS Collective Partners
