SP0302: Sustainability Education Fellows

The Sustainability Education Fellowship will bring together faculty and students to advance sustainability in the curriculum and pedagogy at McGill. Both faculty and students will be engaged through a year-long cohort; the
faculty fellows will be current instructors that will design or revise a course to include sustainability at its core, and the student fellows will be trained on sustainable pedagogy and will be available to the faculty fellows to aid them in
their course (re)design.

Faculty Fellows
Faculty fellows will be instructors at McGill from across discplines who commit to (re)designing a course to infuse sustainability principles into curriculum, pedagogical practices, and assessment approaches. Ten fellows will participate in a collaborative learning experience to integrate sustainability into their courses, and the cornerstone of the fellowship will be a 2-day retreat when Fellows will participate in an immersive training program led by experts in sustainability, teaching, and learning. Throughout the year, Fellows will learn how to connect sustainability principles to their own disciplines and courses, while building an interdisciplinary community. Fellows will also convene for a minimum of 5 additional gatherings and will be expected, by the end of the fellowship, to submit new/revised course syllabi information on how they've integrated sustainability into a current or future course. A stipend of $8,000 will be available to each Fellow to assist in the revision process, which could be applied towards hiring a graduate assistant (either of their own choosing, or via the graduate student fellow network), creating an instructional tool, or other expenses associated with the work.

Student Fellows
This project will partner with the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative (MSSI) Graduate & Postdoc Sustainability Research Collective (a network of over 200 graduate and postdoctoral researchers working on sustainability) to pair faculty members with students trained in sustainability studies. A 2-day training will be offered to 14 members of the Collective, whereby they will learn about sustainable pedagogies and how to rethink a course using a sustainability lens. Afterwards, the students that participated in the training will be eligible to work with a faculty fellow on the re(design) of their course. The students that work with the faculty fellows on the (re)design of their course will gain valuable experience, acting as a knowledgeable resource in this process. For students that don’t get
matched with a faculty fellow, they’ll be invited to the subsequent meetings and will be encouraged to work on their own plan for a sustainability-focused course to implement in their future teaching. Upon completion of the fellowship, MSSI will continue to foster this group of students with continued learning to further their skills in approaching sustainability through a systems-level lens.