3 Working with others to introduce sustainable pedagogies
Sustainable pedagogy is about working in the world, not as an individual but as part of society in your immediate community, your wider local community, and global society. Creating partnerships, participating in the change you want to see and working across disciplines and normalised barriers are all part of working for a sustainable future that works for the benefit of your current learners, and for the future world.
Throughout the course at the end of each unit you have encountered memo cards – onscreen and PDF versions – that reflect each unit’s main learning objectives. The PDF files are for you to keep digitally but they are also designed to print out if you wish. If you print the memo cards, you could:
Leave them in a stack by your workstation and choose one at random to spark a memory of the concepts that you need to be able to offer for sustainable learning, and the actions you need to take.
Display them where they will catch your eye when you are thinking about how to facilitate a learning session.
Use them for some other ideas that have not been covered yet!
The next activity asks you to plan a session with your colleagues that uses the cards to introduce them to the ideas of sustainable pedagogies. In this session it will be beneficial to ask your colleagues to work collaboratively and to use dialogue to enter a brave space where everyone is treated with respect and can express their ideas and concerns freely. The cards can help provide the vocabulary needed for such a discussion.
Activity 8.3 This is the time to act
Throughout the course you have been offered memo cards that encapsulate key learning points offered in each unit.
Here you are asked to use those memo cards to plan and conduct a session to enable your co-educators to understand and use some of the sustainable pedagogies concepts that you have been studying, in their teaching practice.
Task 1 Plan your session
1. In order to plan your session consider how you will:
Use the screen of 21 cards (below) – It is recommended that you pick three cards that cover areas of the course that you found the most interesting, and think would be the most useful to discuss with your colleagues.
Step 1 tab – Select your three favourite cards so the outer edge turns red.
Step 2 tab – Selected cards are displayed full size – click to view text.
Discuss the text on each card, the ideas that are brought to mind and the way that those ideas can help your students develop the knowledge and skills required for more sustainable behaviours.
Make sure everyone feels able to contribute to the discussion. Will you set out rules of engagement? Will you explain that the meeting is intended to be a brave space and explain that this means all voices and opinions are to be respected and above all, heard?
Ask your co-educators questions that will help them think about how they can add the pedagogies from the three selected cards to their teaching context, and have some clear ideas to help them with this too.
Show your co-educators part(s) of the unit in the course that explain the ideas on the cards and the difference they might make to the way that they ask their students to engage with difficult ideas about sustainability.
Ask your co-educators if there is more they would like to learn after reading through the cards. Here you could re-select three cards that the group want to talk about.
To do this click on a selected card again in the ‘Step 1’ tab to deselect it, before choosing another.
If some at the meeting are showing a particular interest, arrange to send the course link and PDFs of the course cards to motivate them to learn more about sustainable pedagogies.
Make a plan with your co-educators to help them include some sustainable pedagogies ideas in their teaching. Think about how you may want to set it up other follow-up sessions.
Make a plan for how you want to conduct the session by detailing this in your learning journal, using this planning template or otherwise.
Task 2 Conduct your session
1. Set a date and ensure all participants know whether it is:
A face-to-face meeting – in this case the print friendly PDFs of the cards will be useful as they have been designed to be printed and cut out.
An online meeting – in this case the onscreen version above will be the most useful and will work well using a ‘share screen’ function.
2. Conduct the session, taking into account the considerations from Task 1 and the notes you recorded on the template file provided to assist you.
2. 
Post a 100-word summary on the Activity 8.3 forum discussion.
Remember that, to obtain your digital badge, you must have posted a contribution to at least one forum discussion in Units 1–7 and one of the forum discussions in Unit 8. You must have also completed the quiz at the end of Unit 5 and scored at least 80%.
2.2 Sustainable pedagogies, locally and globally