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Scientific animations without borders (SAWBO): an innovative strategy for promoting education for sustainable development

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Abstract

While the United Nations Millennium Declaration identified several key benchmarks for sustainable development, the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ASD) now reaffirms, refines, and retools those sustainable development goals for the next 15 years. Specifically, the ASD calls for developing and extending opportunities for transitions to sustainable societies—a goal that necessarily includes more sustainable research practices capable of fostering the uptake of the values, behaviors, strategies, and lifestyles required to realize a sustainable future for all people and societies as well. This paper describes one such sustainable practice project: Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO). Housed at Michigan State University in the United States, at all levels of its ESD project, SAWBO enacts a collaborative, flexible, adaptive, and resilient practice with global and local, scientific and indigenous, knowledge experts in order to transfer scientifically grounded knowledge about agricultural, public health, and socioeconomic issues of public concern to rural areas of Africa and other places affected by those concerns. SAWBO's principle medium of transfer uses animated, linguistically localized, educational videos, distributed free of cost, and intended to be both readily accessible and easily shared by all types of audiences, but especially by low-literate adult learners in developing regions. As such, SAWBO’s ESD approach addresses many of Agenda 2030’s 17 Global Goals and aligns with the global effort to develop educational approaches that are not only economically, but also socially and environmentally, sustainable. As a project, SAWBO also embodies a model of sustainability education practice adaptable to different methodologies across a variety of spaces and educational levels and is itself also methodologically sustainable.

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Source: Authors’ work from the UNDESA (2017)

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Acknowledgements

This research was made possible by the Fulbright Commission in Spain and Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) and Institute of International Education (IIE).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Castilla La Mancha Faculty of Education, 13002, Ciudad Real, Spain

    María Angeles Rodriguez-Domenech

  2. Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing, USA

    Julia Bello-Bravo

  3. Department of Entomology, Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing, USA

    Barry R. Pittendrigh

Authors
  1. María Angeles Rodriguez-Domenech
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  2. Julia Bello-Bravo
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  3. Barry R. Pittendrigh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to María Angeles Rodriguez-Domenech.

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Handled by Osamu Saito, United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, Japan.

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Rodriguez-Domenech, M.A., Bello-Bravo, J. & Pittendrigh, B.R. Scientific animations without borders (SAWBO): an innovative strategy for promoting education for sustainable development. Sustain Sci 14, 1105–1116 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0624-8

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