Abstract
IN THE SIMPLEST TERMS, resilience education is about building our individual and community capacities to flourish in times of tremendous transition. It strengthens our ability to weather the inevitable adversity that comes with system transformation. It gives us a systems lens through which to understand the forces driving change at multiple scales. It harnesses the creative energy of people, enabling work across cultural divides to increase the sustainability of our social-ecological systems. At its heart, it cultivates virtues like courage, humility, and frugality, which help us preserve what we most value in our communities.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Mark Costanzo et al., “Energy Conservation Behavior: The Difficult Path from Information to Action,” American Psychologist 41 (1986), 521–28. For a general discussion of research on behavior change, see Doug McKenzie-Mohr, Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing, 3rd ed. (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2011).
- 2.
For an insightful account of different kinds of educational programs, see Donald Mocker and George Spear, “Lifelong Learning: Formal, Nonformal, Informal, and Self-Directed,” Information Series No. 241, ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational Education, 1982 (ED220723).
- 3.
Mocker and Spear, “Lifelong Learning.”
- 4.
L. Turner, A. Sandova, and F. J. Chaloupka, “School Garden Programs Are on the Rise in US Public Elementary Schools, but Are Less Common in Schools with Economically Disadvantaged Student Populations,” Bridging the Gap Program, Health Policy Center, Institute for Health Research and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2014.
- 5.
For more information about green schools, see Green Schools National Network, “The Teaching Building: Current Practices in Sustainability in the 21st Century Classroom,” https://greenschoolsnationalnetwork.org/teaching-building-current-practices-sustainability-21st-century-classroom/.
- 6.
National Wildlife Federation, “Eco-Schools USA Spring 2017 Snapshot,” accessed April 28, 2017, https://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Eco-schools/Snapshots/Spring2017Eco-SchoolsUSASnapshot.ashx.
- 7.
See Common Ground, http://commongroundct.org/community-programs/.
- 8.
See KIPP, http://www.kipp.org/approach/character/.
- 9.
See Next Generation Science Standards, http://www.nextgenscience.org/.
- 10.
The Second Nature annual reports detail this progress; see http://secondnature.org/our-impact/annual-reports/.
- 11.
Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Practice (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012).
- 12.
For an outsider’s perspective on Green Mountain’s sustainability education, see Cosette M. Joyner Armstrong et al., “When the Informal Is the Formal, the Implicit Is the Explicit: Holistic Sustainability Education at Green Mountain College,” International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 17, no. 6 (2016): 756–75.
- 13.
According to Ryan and Baumann, 59 percent of adults have some postsecondary education, whereas 43 percent earned an associate’s degree and 33 percent a bachelor’s degree. Camille Ryan and Curt Baumann, “Educational Achievement in the United States: 2015,” March 2016, www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf.
- 14.
For a discussion of the role of cultivating virtues related to building sustainable and resilient communities, see William Throop, “Flourishing in the Age of Climate Change,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 60 (2016): 296–314.
- 15.
Stephen Sterling, “Learning for Resilience, or the Resilient Learner? Towards a Necessary Reconciliation in a Paradigm of Sustainable Education,” Environmental Education Research 16 (2010): 511–28.
- 16.
Bryan Norton, Sustainable Values, Sustainable Changes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
- 17.
J. T. Woolley, M. V. McGinnis, and J. Kellner, “The California Watershed Movement: Science and the Politics of Place,” Natural Resources Journal 42, no. 1 (2002): 133–83. See also Michael V. McGinnis, Science and Sensibility: Negotiating an Ecology of Place (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
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Throop, W. (2017). Learning Our Way toward Resilience. In: Lerch, D. (eds) The Community Resilience Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-861-9_15
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