CHALLENGE

Help cultivate sustainable practices in American youth by addressing the educational gap of outdated pedagogical models found in high schools across the United States.

GENERAL INFO

Partners
Parsons, The New School for Design, The Freshkills Park Alliance, Gaynor McCown Expeditionary Learning High School, and Arable Labs

Team
Andrew Shea, Daniela V Sanchez, John Roach, Max Stearns, Tanvi Dhond

Location
New York

Role
Design Strategist, Project Manager, and Facilitator

OUTCOME

A cross-disciplinary modular learning toolkit called ‘Earth’s Balance IRL’.

The toolkit introduces high school students to sustainability and as the name suggests, engages them on a personal journey in maintaining the Earth’s Balance ‘in real life’.

The toolkit, which will be available in both print and downloadable versions, provides educators with the tools needed to build reflective and actionable sustainable practice in students, while offering a variety of strategies to tackle crucial environmental subjects.

IRL has 3 main components:

TOOLKIT includes worksheets for students, in-classroom tools, and a facilitator guide for educators.
WEBSITE features the learning modules for students, capacity building tools for teachers, and the opportunity to connect with the wider network of high schools, students, and teachers that are using the toolkit in their classrooms.
VIDEOS use storytelling, humour, and animations to introduce sustainability and the delicate role that humans have in shaping our planet.

MY ROLE

I joined the team as a design strategist, service designer, and project manager consultant for the course of 10 months. My role in the project focused on four core areas:

Facilitation & Project Management - planning and managing the development of the project and facilitating workshops with local high-schools and external stakeholders.
Sustainability Strategies - leading and guiding the implementation of sustainability practices and strategies during workshops and final outcome development.
Synthesizing Learnings - synthesizing learnings from workshops and communicating findings to all the stakeholders involved.
Toolkit Development - translating sustainability knowledge and workshop insights into a modular and engaging toolkit for high schools nationwide.

Our vision for the toolkit is to provide educators with the resources needed to seamlessly integrate concepts of sustainability in their curriculum and meet NGSS requirements.

We hope that it will engage students to reflect on and enact new practices that are aligned with these concepts. Further, we hope that it will generate a community of students, families, neighbourhoods, local and national organizations that are engaged and invested in building a sustainable future.

CONTEXT

Would standing on a towering mound of trash convince you to consume less? Our project, Balancing Earth IRL, addresses this question by reframing our relationship to waste.

Together with our partners, Freshkills Park—once the world’s largest landfill, high schools, and educators, we are repositioning the topic of sustainability.

Balancing Earth IRL was launched in 2016 in order to actively engage New Yorkers with the impact that consumer habits have on our ecosystems. Since then, the team has lead workshops and field trips with McCown High school in Staten Island and also met with educators to explore the topic of sustainability. The workshops gave us a window into how high school curriculum addresses sustainability, and our meetings with educators and experts have shaped the way we see our toolkit in relation to the Next Generation Science Standards. Our preliminary research strengthened our resolve to ground concepts of sustainability in the everyday experience of students and relate them to their immediate environments such as parks, recycling centers, and other neighborhood spaces.

DIAGRAMS

Redesigning High School Pedagogy on Sustainability