Keywords

FormalPara Key Message

This case study suggests that weaving curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy together may act as a fulcrum around which other school dimensions can be reoriented toward whole-school transformation. The case demonstrates that transitioning to such an integrated, student-centered, and project-based learning model can be initially disorienting for both students and teachers. To overcome this challenge, the chapter argues that scaffolds are needed to support and prepare new school members for such a learning model.

1 Introduction

Education is widely recognized as playing an important role in sustainability transitions and climate change adaptation and mitigation (Kwauk, 2020; MECCE and NAAEE, 2022; Wals & Benavot, 2017). To leverage the potential of education in imagining and enacting more sustainable futures, mainstream approaches to schooling must expand beyond their current focus on test-driven cognitive learning to include social-emotional learning and action competencies that prepare learners to transform unsustainable behaviors, attitudes, and systems (MECCE and NAAEE, 2022; UNESCO, 2021).

Theoretical contributions to the field of education for sustainable development (ESD) and climate change education (CCE) recommend learning approaches that are project-based, experiential, localized, and grounded in real-world contexts (Demssie et al., 2020; Kwauk, 2020). Implementing these recommendations and reorienting schools toward a greater focus on sustainability requires more than making additions to curriculum; many ESD scholars advocate for a “whole system redesign” to rethink the underlying values and assumptions that influence school structures (Sterling, 2004; Wals & Benavot, 2017).

Schools that take such a whole-school approach (WSA) to sustainability education position sustainability not as a discrete disciplinary subject, but as a core purpose of schooling. WSAs explore sustainability in a relational way, embedding it in all aspects of the school’s systems, from curriculum and pedagogy to school vision and leadership (Wals & Mathie, 2022). Support for WSAs as an effective and necessary way to implement environmental and sustainability education is backed by stakeholders at international, regional, and local levels (Hargreaves, 2008; UNESCO, 2016). Despite the wide theoretical support for WSAs, examples of schools that practice such a model are still not mainstream. Aside from the challenges of implementing a WSA at the school level—such as rethinking school schedules, staff and teacher training, grading systems, school infrastructure, and teacher evaluation standards—transitioning schools to a WSA to sustainability is further complicated by the wider systems in which schools are embedded.

A whole-system redesign at the school level is therefore difficult because our educational systems have yet to undergo a similar redesign process; these ingrained systems in turn limit the extent of innovation that can take place at any individual school. For example, in their redesign process, schools will likely confront policies and practices that restrict innovation at: the district level (how funding is allocated and the types of professional development offered); state or provincial level (how curriculum standards are written and teacher certification requirements are designed); and national level (how grades are communicated and college admissions requirements are set). Any changes made at the school level must therefore consider the school’s embeddedness within these systems, which may enable or constrain desired changes. The entangled relationships at different levels highlight the need to simultaneously engage stakeholders across the web to make any significant change (Ferreira & Ryan, 2013).

1.1 GCE Lab School in the Context of Sustainability Education in the United States

In the United States, there is no national mandate to teach about sustainability or climate change. The onus therefore falls on states, NGOs, schools, and individual teachers to integrate content into their programming (Feinstein & Carlton, 2013). Such efforts usually focus on curriculum reform, as it is the most feasible way of ensuring students build sustainability literacy. While an important first step, a sole focus on curricular reform is widely acknowledged as insufficient in preparing learners with the knowledge, skills, values, and agency needed to cultivate more sustainable and just futures (Kwauk, 2020; Sterling et al., 2018; Stevenson et al., 2017; UNESCO, 2018). However, when curriculum is designed around ESD themes and pedagogies, it necessarily acts as a fulcrum that connects other school structures and practices (Sterling, 2013).

One school that has served as a laboratory for imagining and testing alternatives to entrenched educational conventions is Global Citizenship Experience Lab School (GCELS), an independent upper secondary school in Chicago, Illinois, USA. A private nonprofit school, GCELS was founded in 2010 on the belief that, in order to “cultivate responsible global citizens in the 21st century, the traditional transmissive models of education” must be “rethought from the ground up” (Leite & Moring-D’Angier, 2022, p. 24). GCELS holds that students should graduate high school with the practical experience, empathy, and agency needed for careers that are both fulfilling and meaningful for fostering a sustainable world.

Built around an approach similar to the “head, hands, and heart” model (Sipos et al., 2008), GCELS’s program aims to instill in students the knowledge, skills, and values of global citizenship. Over the 4-year program, students develop ESD competencies (see Redman & Wiek, 2021) including systems thinking, futures thinking, and inter- and intrapersonal competencies. There is also a special focus on building action competence, which entails a combination of: strengthening conceptual knowledge of action possibilities; developing a willingness to take action; and growing confidence that one has both the abilities to make change and that actions taken will make a positive contribution to sustainable development (Sass et al., 2022). As an independent school, GCELS is not mandated to follow the Illinois State Board of Education standards, nor does it have to follow the state assessment schedule, which gives the school more freedom to experiment with innovative and integrated approaches to curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy.

This chapter presents a case study of GCELS’s approach to sustainability by examining artifacts from two Grade 9 courses as a way of exploring the interconnections between the school’s curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy—as well as how connecting these three dimensions reverberates throughout the entire school model and beyond. In addition, this case study highlights the obstacles encountered when attempting to implement a WSA to sustainability and identifies some of the wider systemic changes that must be made to amplify innovation at the school level.

1.2 Theoretical Underpinnings

GCELS’s learning model is influenced by the rich tradition of progressive education in Chicago, where the impact of educators like John Dewey and Jane Addams still resonates. The Progressive Era of education, focused on real-world problem-solving, social interaction, and personal reflection, has many pedagogical similarities with sustainability education and can be seen as a precursor to ESD (Armstrong, 2011). Progressive and ESD educators similarly embrace constructivist learning theory, where teachers act as facilitators of student-centered environments that allow learners to construct their own meaning and knowledge (ibid.).

The collaborative learning approach and instructional support embedded in GCELS’s curriculum—to be discussed throughout this chapter—can be analyzed through the lens of Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural learning theory. Central to Vygotsky’s theory is his conceptualization of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), or the difference between what a learner can do without versus what a learner can do with assistance. Such assistance is provided through scaffolding, a concept introduced by Vygotsky (1978) and elaborated upon by Bruner (1986) for its instructional applications (De León, 2012). Scaffolding—or breaking learning into digestible chunks that assist with the learning process—might include a variety of strategies, including the use of tools that are appropriate to a learner’s interests and knowledge level, or modeling behaviors and processes to support learners in digesting new concepts or developing new skills (Armstrong, 2015). Scaffolding is especially helpful in ESD, due to the complex and values-laden nature of the content (ibid.). While Bruner (1986) developed scaffolding for use with school-aged children, the technique is equally applicable to learners of any age (De León, 2012). At GCELS, scaffolding is built into both the student and teacher learning experiences. GCELS’s process in identifying the need for such scaffolds and building them into their learning model may offer useful insights for other learning institutions transitioning from a WSA to sustainability.

1.3 Methodology

Considering the need for examples of how to transition schools to more student-centered and WSAs to sustainability, this case study builds on personal practitioner insights from 8 years of working at GCELS as a teacher, curriculum designer, and trainer between 2012 and 2020. While GCELS offers a full educational program for students in Grades 9–12, this chapter analyzes courses from the first term of Grade 9 and the program elements specifically designed to ease the transition of students and teachers into the GCELS learning community. Examining and analyzing publicly-available online student portfolios and course-related documents from the two Grade 9 courses featured was the main data source.

2 The GCELS Model

2.1 Curriculum

Curriculum is perhaps the most approachable starting point for integrating sustainability into school programming. Focusing on curriculum draws immediate attention to what is being taught, with less attention given to how it is taught, or why. At GCELS, an early commitment to the three keywords in the school name—global, citizenship, and experience—brought the why and how under scrutiny as part of the curriculum design process. A commitment to global awareness led to alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals; dedication to active citizenship manifested in thematic, inquiry- and project-based curriculum; and a commitment to practical experience gave rise to real-world experiential learning. In this way, curriculum became fundamental to the development of the school model, as structures, policies, and training had to be designed to support such learning approaches. In the following section, I discuss GCELS’s learning model, which combines inquiry- and project-based learning through investigations that cycle from guiding questions to action projects.

2.1.1 Real-World, Inquiry- and Project-Based Learning

What are the biggest challenges facing humanity, and how do we address them? Students begin their first term at GCELS by grappling with this guiding question. The prompt is the first in a series of questions that guide students’ initial integrated Humanities course, titled SDGs and You: Mission 2030. The SDGs and You course introduces students to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and connects them to the city of Chicago, thereby locally contextualizing the global goals. Each step of the learning unit is initiated with a guiding question (GQ) to stimulate curiosity and critical thinking. The sequence of questions moves from exploring broad global issues to thinking about local and individual reflections and actions (see Table 15.1). These questions are posed by the teacher as model guiding questions, introducing students to the inquiry-based learning environment. As students progress through the 4-year program, they become more adept at generating their own guiding questions and designing corresponding investigations.

Table 15.1 Unit 1 guiding questions for the SDGs and You course (2021 iteration)
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The SDGs and You course is structured as three cyclical investigations (or Units), each unfolding in three, often overlapping, stages: an internal investigation (I), which introduces core vocabulary, formulas, concepts, and academic skills needed to pursue the guiding question; an external investigation (E), which connects classroom concepts to real-life scenarios through city-wide field experiences; and an action project (A), whereby students synthesize and demonstrate learning from the unit through a hands-on, multimedia project. The action project balances cognitive, psychomotor, and affective learning domains (see Sipos et al., 2008) and builds action competence. All GCELS courses include these “IEA” phases, though delineations between the stages are not fixed.

Prompted by the guiding questions, students taking the SDGs and You course learn world geography, write comparative case studies, draw and analyze resource maps of Chicago neighborhoods, and interpret global statistics through the lenses of human rights and equity. Through these hands-on activities, they build core academic skills, including reading, writing, and social studies competencies that are aligned with the United States Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards.

In addition to aligning with CCSS and C3 standards, GCELS interprets the SDGs as a set of global “standards” that drive a pragmatic definition of global citizenship education (Leite, 2021). While the SDG connections are evident in SDGs and You, every other core GCELS course also aligns with at least one SDG and indicator. If aligning curriculum with academic standards steers students toward literacy recommended at the national level, aligning with the SDGs contextualizes learning in both local and global settings.

During the first term of the school year, the SDGs and You Humanities course is paired with the Water STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) course, which takes a deep dive into SDG 6. Pursuing the question, How is our understanding of water reflected in our interactions with it?, students learn algebra, functions, and Earth and life sciences. Using data from sources ranging from local municipalities to the UN, the course explores the paradox of water as a resource that is at the same time abundant and rare. STEAM skills are developed within a sociological context, using timely real-world examples that are updated each year during an annual process of course revision. Offering the SDGs and You and Water courses during the same term allows teachers to collaborate and plan lessons that encourage students to draw connections between social and ecological sustainability.

GCELS’s approach to project-based learning (PBL) covers the seven “gold standard” principles identified by the Buck Institute for Education, a leader in PBL since the 1980s. These principles include the following: a challenging problem or question; sustained inquiry; authenticity; student voice and choice; reflection; critique and revision; and a public product (Larmer et al., 2015). GCELS’s curriculum departs from common interpretations of PBL—which foreground the student voice and choice principle—by including a recommended, pre-written course outline that can be used directly by teachers. Having a prewritten curriculum provides scaffolding for teachers who are new to facilitating PBL and may need the extra structure as they transition to a more student-centered classroom (Barron et al., 1998; Larmer et al., 2015). Additional scaffolds will be discussed in the following section on pedagogy.

2.2 Pedagogy

Sustainability education is as much about pedagogy as it is about curriculum (Evans & Ferreira, 2020). Teaching through real-world, inquiry- and project-based learning calls for “unlearning” ingrained habits and assumptions that both students and teachers bring to the school setting (Lozano et al., 2022). Some of these habits include siloed disciplinary thinking, expected student-teacher roles, and favored test-based measures of achievement.

By the time students reach Grade 9, they have had almost a decade of experiences that influence what they expect to do, feel, and learn in school. Likewise, teachers who join GCELS directly from other schools or teacher-training institutes have little practice in how to foster and facilitate an inquiry- and project-based environment. Despite broad support for the use of active, student-centered pedagogies in sustainability learning, “a lack of clear guidelines for ‘how to’ is off-putting” for many teachers (Evans & Ferreira, 2020, p. 29). An awareness of these reservations has influenced the onboarding and professional development processes at GCELS and led to the Model the Learning course, which asks teachers to complete course action projects as an example for the students, thereby shifting classroom power dynamics and opening a dialog between students and teacher on process and assessment criteria.

2.2.1 Modeling the Learning

When introducing a new action project, GCELS teachers share their own sample and ask students to evaluate it using the project rubric. An example of one such teacher project is shared in Fig. 15.1, which was posted on a GCELS teacher’s public blog. This project asks learners to design an infographic for use on Chicago public transportation that raises awareness about water usage (see Table 15.2 for the project rubric). The infographic includes calculations on personal water usage and comparisons to national and international statistics. Students demonstrate a range of competencies in producing the infographic, including: math calculations and graphing; visual communication and graphic design; and global and intrapersonal awareness. All action projects are posted publicly on the student’s blog, along with a personal reflection about the process and lessons learned.

Fig. 15.1
An infographic titles What's your share. It has a pie chart and a world map for the water usage distribution across 4 activities and countries. Hygiene leads at 52.5 percent. The average Chinese citizen uses 23.8 gallons per day, and the average American citizen uses 151.8 gallons per day.

Sample action project from the Water course by a STEAM teacher at GCELS (AMD, 2014)

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Table 15.2 GCELS action project rubric from the Water course (2021 iteration)
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Having teachers complete the action project and present it to students positions teachers as students and students as teachers, promoting a power shift with various and far-reaching implications. First, it gives teachers credibility for having gone through the process students will go through. At the same time, teachers gain insights into the learning process that they would not otherwise have (for example, teachers may share what the experience was like, or how long it took them to complete each step). When teachers open their work up to critique from students, this builds transparency and understanding about the assessment criteria; students now understand the project from the perspective of teachers. Overall, this mutual shift helps transition the classroom to a more horizontal power dynamic; oftentimes, both teachers and students will offer improvements to a rubric based on their role shifting.

The added scaffolding in GCELS’s curriculum is a response to several years of observing students and teachers struggle to adjust to the school’s learning model. Aspiring to the “gold standard” of PBL requires significant time and energy from teachers as they not only design course content and structure but also undergo a process of letting go of the perceived needs to “control” their classroom and to be the sole content expert that disseminates information to students.

For these reasons, part of GCELS’s onboarding process for new teachers is to complete a Model the Learning professional development course. Model the Learning is designed for teachers to experience the student perspective before teaching a new course. Teachers receive the written course curriculum and then actually take the course by reading embedded materials, completing formative assessments, conducting external investigations, and completing the unit action projects. While moving through the course, they write reflections on the flow of questions, swap out content, update case studies, plan field experiences, invite guest speakers, and revise the action project rubric and scaffolding based on their own learning experiences.

For teachers new to PBL, the Model the Learning process removes some of the unpredictability associated with action projects and affords them time to build their own reflexive practice. As teachers become more comfortable with their courses and the GCELS model in general, they rely less on the prescribed curriculum and become more confident in increasing student voice and choice. Having teachers complete Model the Learning requires a significant time commitment but making space for this experience early in their GCELS career alleviates some of the burnout that teachers experience as they adjust to being immersed in GCELS’s learning environment. While only teachers undergo the Model the Learning process, everyone who works at GCELS participates in a professional development course called Inquiry- and Project-Based Learning 101. The course introduces the GCELS model and helps build a culture based on the understanding that learning takes place anywhere, with anyone.

2.3 Assessment

Assessments are notoriously challenging in learning environments designed around sustainability pedagogies. In contrast to knowledge-based learning, which focuses on what students know, ESD environments favor competency-based learning, which focuses on what students can do (Olema et al., 2021). While there is high agreement about what sustainability competencies entail (see Wiek & Redman, 2022), there is less consensus about how to assess these competencies in students (Cebrián et al., 2020; Wiek & Redman, 2022). Evaluating a student’s action competence—which, as discussed previously, includes a combination of knowledge and skills, willingness to act, and confidence in one’s ability to influence change (Sass et al., 2020)—poses a challenge for teachers.

For K-12 schools in the United States, which are tasked with preparing students for post-secondary education, assessment also involves the problem of how to communicate student performance in a way that colleges and universities understand. Schools that use PBL describe this challenge as having “a foot in both worlds,” balancing the evaluation of student work with state and national test score reporting conventions (Boss, 2012, p. 48). This testing culture is embedded in all levels of the U.S. school system, and scholars argue that the “discourse of achievement and test-based accountability works against the goals” of sustainability education (Pizmony-Levy & Gan, 2021, p. 4).

The challenge of how to communicate student performance has influenced how grade transcripts are designed at GCELS. Transcript design in turn determines how students are evaluated at the classroom level. After several years of experimenting with alternative systems, GCELS currently uses a 100-point scale to evaluate action projects and communicate grades. Using the common language of grading scales and grade point averages (GPA) facilitates communication with colleges and universities, who already request additional explanations to interpret students’ unfamiliar thematic course sequence. In the next section, I analyze GCELS’s rubric design using an example from the Water course.

2.3.1 Rubric Design

Each summer before the new school year starts, GCELS teachers update their courses and participate in several weeks of professional development. In these annual cycles of curriculum revision, rubrics and assessments are the most scrutinized dimension of the GCELS learning model.

Rubrics that are used to evaluate action projects are based on a competency-based model. Competency-based assessments seek to capture a student’s ability to, for example, transfer knowledge, apply skills to complex situations, solve problems, and make decisions in different contexts (Gallardo, 2020). Many competency-based rubrics are designed as charts, including an explanation of a desired competency, a rating scale of performance levels, and a description of achievement at each level. GCELS experimented with rubrics designed in this way, but they proved to be visually overwhelming for both teachers and students; the former did not find the rubrics any more helpful for grading, and the latter did not actively use them as a guide in developing their projects.

To make rubrics more student-friendly, GCELS’s current approach draws from a single-point rubric design. Single-point rubrics are easier to read, leave more room for feedback, and facilitate student self-assessments (Fluckiger, 2010). At GCELS, rubrics are more than evaluative tools. From a sociocultural perspective, they are also pedagogical and dialogical, being used to introduce a project, ground the conversation around reasonable assessment criteria, and, ultimately, foster common understanding and accountability. GCELS structures rubrics as a series of questions intended to initiate dialog between teacher and student. A sample rubric from the first Water course action project is shown in Table 15.2.

Regarding action competence, the sample rubric in Table 15.2 asks students to demonstrate specific knowledge and skills, including mathematical calculations and graphing, comparisons, and data communication. Student reflections on the infographic action project, posted on their public blogs, provide anecdotal evidence of their willingness to act:

I am enlightened by the fact that not everyone has the same privileges that I have, not everyone has the same education, the same quality of water (Student DAB, 2021).

I have really enjoyed this unit regardless of how physically taxing it was to carry 7.5 gallons of water .3 miles, I’m thankful for the perspective it has offered me regarding water consumption (Student ER, 2021).

This project made me realize just how important water is, and how not everyone is as lucky as I am to have easy access to it (Student 1126, 2022).

I think that we can all do a better job at preserving water. Earth is a shared planet and we all as global citizens have to pitch in to take care of our planet (Student 1117, 2022).

Students submit the infographic action project approximately 4 weeks into their GCELS experience. At that early stage, it is difficult to measure any growth in confidence, but the 4-year program aims to build confidence in their ability to effect change and further strengthen their action competence.

In an effort to address some of the issues related to assessment, in 2019, GCELS joined the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), a network of schools working to design, test, and mainstream a digital transcript that communicates student competencies without using grades or GPAs. Instead of a quantitative transcript that “reinforces outdated modes of education, constrains innovation, limits learning to single subjects, and impedes the pursuit of educational equity and excellence” (MTC, 2019), the Mastery Transcript offers an alternative. The MTC relieves some of the work of GCELS’s school counselor, who spends hours each year explaining the GCELS model and translating the thematic courses to various college admissions officers. MTC works actively with K-12 schools, colleges, and universities to “promote sustainable change in higher education admissions” (ibid., 2021), but mainstreaming changes requires capacity building in both schools and higher ed. admissions officers, as well as a major cultural shift in how and why students are evaluated.

3 Conclusion

The artifacts examined in this chapter represent a snapshot in time of the GCELS learning model, and how it has sought to bridge some of the divisions that underpin mainstream schooling. With a focus on scaffolding, the chapter gives some practical examples of how schools taking a WSA to sustainability can face challenges posed by trying to imagine, test, and scale alternatives to the education system to which they are beholden. Approaching school redesign as a process of simultaneously rethinking curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy attempts to instill a more relational way of thinking, which is essential if we are to transcend and transform the social and ecological crises of today (Lange et al., 2021; Wals & Mathie, 2022).

By approaching education from an ecological perspective, connections between disciplines, people, and communities may be reestablished and strengthened. At GCELS, how to make these connections most effectively is an ongoing process of discovery. The school’s learning model is at the same time constantly evolving and deeply rooted in commitments to global, citizenship, and experience. Ensuring there is transparency and self-reflection on this continuous process of change is one way in which schools can endeavor to prepare students for futures that are unpredictable, complex, and as of yet, unimagined.

4 Postscript

After this chapter was written, GCELS’s board of directors abruptly made the decision to close the school. Citing low enrollment numbers, the board did not foresee a financial path for keeping the school open.

This chapter highlighted some of the challenges GCELS faced as it experimented with a whole-school approach to global citizenship and sustainability education. While these challenges proved insurmountable for the school, they served as provocations for innovative thought and practice. The fate of GCELS, thus, leaves several questions:

How to fund schools like GCELS?

In the U.S. context, GCELS required, on the one hand, private independent status (to have greater freedom in curricular and programming design), but, on the other hand, a tuition-based model. How is this type of education made accessible to all students, then? In the absence of an endowment, schools must operate through a combination of tuition funds, partnerships with scholarship organizations, corporate backers, private donations, government grants, and continuous fundraising. These sources can be inconsistent, short-term, and may come with strings attached. In the case of GCELS, an over-reliance on a small base of private donors became untenable as the school moved past its first decade.

How to support schools to serve as laboratories for transformation?

Vaughter (2016) advocates for schools to act as living laboratories that test and model learning for sustainability and climate education. Though there is no single model for Vaughter’s ideal, “lab school” in North America generally means a partnership between a school and a university: University-backed research informs pedagogical and curricular decisions within the school and, in turn, the school provides a real-world setting to carry out academic research. Such partnerships ensure teachers have access to cutting-edge research and professional development. Without university backing, GCELS still called itself a laboratory school based on its dedication to innovation and iteration but needed support for longitudinal studies that could have documented the iterations of its learning model—including any failures and processes for addressing them.

How should schools like GCELS promote their learning model to prospective students?

Despite the increasing intensity of climate change and related social issues, the primary measure for secondary school performance remains focused on academic measures. Real-world, project-based learning motivated by the SDGs is attractive for many families, but may not, alone, fulfill the desire for students to be well-prepared for university entrance exams and competitive actors in the global economy. How, then, to balance authentic, purpose-driven, student-led learning with test prep, ICT (information, communications, and technology) literacy, and other twenty-first-century learning competencies? In the case of GCELS, perhaps a different conjuncture and more institutional support were needed to serve a student body that was disillusioned by, yet beholden to, grade point average as a primary measure of achievement.

For schools working to influence systemic shifts in education, more investment is needed so they have the time and resources to imagine and test alternatives. GCELS’s community believed in education as a powerful tool for transformative, systemic change toward sustainability. How much are we willing to invest in this belief?