Accelerating Change-Making: Reflections on Embedding Regenerative Practices in School Climate Action

Abstract

This chapter explores how three schools in Canada are accelerating climate action through a whole school approach, facilitated by the Climate Action Accelerator Program (CAAP). Teachers and administrators from three different schools and at different stages (early, intermediate, and advanced) of whole school sustainability, engaged in critical reflection on their schools’ journeys, shared through three vignettes. The vignettes are followed by a discussion of shared approaches across the schools that we noted as important—including regenerative practice as a paradigm shift—for moving schools along climate action pathways and whole school journeys as well as shared challenges and emerging opportunities.

FormalPara Key Message

Schools have the opportunity, and arguably a moral imperative, to create an aspirational vision for a healthy, thriving world. This chapter shares commonalities, challenges, and emerging opportunities of three schools’ journeys as they work to accelerate climate action through whole school approaches with efforts that aim beyond sustainability toward restoring and regenerating the world around us.

1 Introduction

In this chapter, administrators and teachers from three independent schools in Canada and at different stages of whole school sustainability describe and critically reflect on their journeys. The schools joined the pilot cohort of the Climate Action Accelerator Program (CAAP) that was launched in January 2022. As part of the program, each school has made a commitment to create and implement bold, high-impact, whole school climate action plans. In doing so, they are striving to become leaders in the K-12 sector and within their communities, aiming to be at the forefront of educational responses focused on a just and regenerated world. These three schools are all at different stages of their whole school approach journeys of integrating sustainability and climate action. These schools each started their journey prior to joining CAAP. The CAAP allows them to form a network with other schools pursuing the same goals and requires that schools develop a committed governance team that aligns with a whole school framework.

1.1 Why Whole School Approaches to Climate Action Are Needed

Young people primarily learn about climate change through formal schools (Field et al., 2019); however, most often climate change education occurs within science subjects and often predominantly focuses on cognitive knowledge, specifically centering scientific literacy in terms of the physical mechanisms of climate change and the validity of climate science (Henderson, 2019; Wynes & Nicholas, 2019). While a cognitive understanding of climate change mechanisms and impacts is imperative, it does not attend to the whole person and often lacks an action-oriented engagement with socio-emotional or justice-focused dimensions of climate change education (Grewal et al., 2022; Hargis & McKenzie, 2020; McKenzie, 2021; UNESCO, 2019; Wynes & Nicholas, 2019). A national evaluation of climate change education policy in Canada (Bieler et al., 2018) showed shallow engagement with climate change, an overwhelming focus on energy efficiency upgrades in schools, and a lack of holistic responses to climate change. Bieler et al.’s research identifies gaps between physical operations and learning. From our experience, this gap occurs when school facility departments do not communicate directly with teaching staff, causing missed learning opportunities. We believe that students would be more likely to see their learning as responsive to the unfolding climate crisis if they experience these changes not only in physical operations but across school governance and in classroom teaching, signifying that their schools are taking climate action seriously.

The delayed leadership of formal education systems has been echoed in the streets by youth climate activists in countries around the world (Han & Anh, 2020), specifically by youth groups advocating for increased climate change education (Climate Education Reform British Columbia, 2021; Teach for the Future, 2021), including the first-ever student-written education bill, Climate Education Bill, in the UK (2022). Currently, 39% of countries have a national-level law, policy, or plan specifically focused on climate change education (Benavot & McKenzie, 2022). In Canada, delayed policy leadership is also evident in the limited number of explicit and mandatory climate change curriculum expectations in regional curriculum documents (Field et al., 2023). Other recent research has benchmarked rates of youth climate anxiety internationally, reporting that 60% of youth respondents across countries are very to extremely worried about climate change (Hickman et al., 2021). In this same study, climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government responses and associated feelings of betrayal (Hickman et al., 2021). A recent Canadian study found that Canadian youth, similar to the Hickman et al. (2021) study, reported feeling afraid (67%), anxious (63%), and powerless (58%) in relation to climate change, which are all normal emotional responses to the climate crisis and for most young people are not pathological (Clayton et al., 2017). In addition, this Canadian study explored young people’s perspectives on the education system and found that 65% of young people surveyed believe that the education system in Canada should be doing “more” or “a lot more” to educate young people about climate change. Text responses to an open-ended question on how the education system could better support young people’s learning indicated that young people would like an increase in climate change content, a focus on teaching solutions and taking action, and mental health supports provided within the education system.

Given that young people primarily learn about climate change through school, spend a large majority of their time at school, and are also experiencing high rates of negative climate emotions, we propose that schools are essential spaces for not only learning about the climate crisis but also for students to engage in active learning, innovating, experimenting, and taking action that addresses local climate issues. The climate crisis, along with the many intersecting social crises of our time, is emerging and evolving and require that all generations learn about and engage with them synchronously rather than in isolation. There is an amplifying opportunity for schools to be sites of climate learning and action not just for the members of the school but for the surrounding community (Facer, 2012). Research has also demonstrated that the ripple effect of climate change education within schools extends beyond students into families and communities (Lawson et al., 2019). K-12 schools have the potential to be centers for learning and action that help achieve the necessary tipping points in a whole-society approach, inclusive of technical, instrumental, and adaptive transformation, through adopting whole school approaches, community-focused climate actions, and integrating green skills for the climate action framework (Kwuak & Casey, 2021). Young people involved in the transformation of their schools into institutions leading in climate action will undoubtedly experience some offset to negative climate emotions; moreover, we believe that young people witnessing adults, such as school leaders and teachers, taking climate action in pursuit of securing more stable climate futures is one of the most powerful antidotes to negative climate emotions and youths’ accompanying feelings of betrayal (Hickman et al., 2021).

1.2 Climate Action Accelerator Program: A Whole School Approach

The Climate Action Accelerator Program, launched in January 2022, provides an iterative approach and process for schools to improve their climate action through schools by deepening students’ understanding of the climate crisis, developing a whole school climate action plan, establishing benchmarks from which future change can be measured, and participating in a community of practice with other school teams. Participating schools make a 3 year commitment to collaborate with other schools to create and begin implementing a whole school climate action plan. After 1 year, the CAAP enrolled 21 schools from five provinces across Canada. These schools are all independent and are members of the Canadian Accredited Independent Schools (CAIS) association. They are all not-for-profit organizations, registered charities, fee-based, and are governed by an independent board of governors. Many, though not all, independent schools are very established with significant endowments and alumni/ae support. Participating schools create a multidisciplinary team with at least one senior administrator, one faculty member, one representative from the facilities team, and two students. School teams have in many cases grown to be a dozen or more people, including many students. The peer support, sharing of ideas, building capacity, and the level of accountability brought by making this commitment together are seen as helpful to making significant progress.

The CAAP begins with the concept of regeneration—the idea that we must not strive merely to maintain or sustain the current state or strive to do “less bad,” but whole school climate action today can, and should, be about healing, repairing damage, restoring, and creating a future of thriving and flourishing for all. The inspiration for this approach with schools came from the work of Jason F. McLennan, who created the Living Building Challenge, a program first published in 2006 out of the not-for-profit he founded, the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). The Living Building Challenge invites all those working in the built environment to design new buildings and renovate existing ones, with the intention of making them regenerative, using the metaphor of the flower: flowers draw their energy from the sun, nutrients and water from the ground, and their waste provides food for future flowers and supports the health of the ecosystem in which they are growing. Examples of Living Building Challenge projects, as well as many related initiatives for products and communities, can now be found all over the world (International Living Future Institute, 2022). The CAAP also references the work of Bill Reed, a planning consultant, author, and leader in the field of regenerative development for over two decades (2007; 2023), the work of Damon Gameau, an actor, director, and activist from Australia who founded Regen Studios as a catalyst for building the regeneration movement (2023), and the work of Paul Hawken, activist and author, founder of Project Drawdown (2017) and Regeneration (2021). The concept of regeneration, along with themes of urgency, literacy, equity, and hope that underpin the program, has proven to be immediately inspiring for participants. School participants within the CAAP are asked to consider all their actions with the question, “What if every action you took, every decision you made, contributed to a thriving life for all people and all the rest of nature?”

Donella Meadows (1999), in her work on systems change, identified a ranked set of leverage points for intervention. She identified the greatest opportunity for leverage as the “paradigm out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises” and with “the power to transcend paradigms” (p. 3). The CAAP attempts to help school leaders, formal and informal, to adopt this new paradigm of regeneration to drive faster, deeper, and more effective systems change toward whole school climate action. The CAAP theory of change is that transforming schools can inspire school community members, including parents, grandparents, alumni/ae, neighbors, and anyone else connected into becoming change-makers who can influence climate action in business, society, and government today. In this way, the CAAP definition of “whole school” is potentially more aspirational than other frameworks, with its emphasis on regeneration and its striving to influence multiple generations within the communities connected to the schools to expedite the transition to a zero-carbon, just, regenerated world.

The theme of hope is introduced alongside the idea of regeneration at the outset of the program, and is carried throughout the CAAP using the work of Elin Kelsey and her book Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis (2019). Using Kelsey’s model for evidence-based hope, CAAP participants are invited to seek out evidence of where there is already healing, restoration, and regeneration happening in their own communities and around the world. Adults and students alike find this to be a very helpful, motivating practice that provides a greater sense of confidence as they make the mental shift toward regenerative practices.

A strategic framework for whole school climate action was developed for use in the CAAP represented by a common pattern found in nature: the hexagon (Fig. 7.1). From honeycombs to corals and from turtle shells to dragonfly eyes, the hexagon is nature’s elegant solution to maximizing volume and strength while minimizing material use.

Fig. 7.1

Climate action accelerator program’s strategic framework

At the core of a plan, a school leading in climate action must have a compelling aspirational vision of their school as an agent of change in transition to a just and regenerated world. The vision has the power to galvanize the school community and provide inspiration for their climate plan. The vision should be reflected in the school governance and leadership, with clear responsibilities and accountabilities, supported by performance metrics shared throughout the school community that track progress toward defined short- and longer-term goals.

In addition to the vision, there are three dimensions and six strategies that comprise the CAAP framework and that help guide schools in operationalizing their transition to whole school climate action. The three dimensions are briefly outlined below.

• 1. Organizational Culture

The culture of a school is defined by the shared values, social norms, and practices within the organization. To achieve their compelling vision, schools must ensure that the paradigm of regeneration is embedded in their culture and visible throughout the school in the physical space, the curricular and co-curricular programming, school operations, and governance.

• 2. Collective Learning

A whole school approach, led by cross-disciplinary teams, is optimal for collective learning. Everyone in the school community needs to engage in climate change education, learning from and with each other.

• 3. Physical Space

The physical space includes school operations, all resources used on campus, the facilities, and the natural environment stewarded by the school. This physical dimension implicitly teaches and communicates the school’s values to users through interactions with the space and its features. It is the context for the learning experience and, as such, should reflect the compelling vision for sustainability throughout.

The framework includes six strategies, two in each dimension, for schools to create and implement their plans, as displayed in the outer ring of hexagons in the figure above: create a healthy synergetic system, communicate strategically, collaborate in cross-disciplinary teams, use a student-centred approach, share leadership, and design space as a teacher (DoorNumberOne.org, 2022).

The CAAP framework is similar to other whole school frameworks and was specifically influenced by Barr et al.’s model published by The Center for Green Schools at the US Green Building Council (2014). Barr et al. (2014) created a guiding framework to advance whole school sustainability efforts, which has three components, Organizational Culture, Physical Place, and Educational Program, and, within each, three principles to help schools develop their approach to whole school sustainability. More recently, Wals and Mathie (2022) orient a whole school approach as a flower. They guide schools toward taking a systems approach in understanding the opportunities and interrelatedness of working with all the stakeholders in a school community to transform education in the context of emerging global challenges. Building capacity for systems thinking is a common core principle found in all three frameworks, along with many others in practice, in driving successful whole school approaches. Moreover, Holst’s (2022) conceptual framework of whole school approaches, which was developed from synthesized literature, identifies a set of core principles (coherence, continuous learning, participation, responsibility, long-term commitment) and seven areas of action, including interactive and participative governance, cross-disciplinary orientation of curriculum and learning, the process of (re-) designing operations and campus management, community-orientation, fostering competencies through capacity building, and clear and consistent communication. Overall, there is much alignment and commonalities across the whole school approach frameworks derived from literature reviews and the CAAP’s programmatic design.

2 Three Schools’ Journeys Toward Whole School Climate Action

This chapter is a critical reflection from three schools that have worked for years or even decades on sustainability projects and have now completed their first year in the CAAP. Within the cases, it is clear that each school is at a different stage of whole school sustainability (early, intermediate, and advanced), and each school is prioritizing sustainability and climate actions that are context-specific. The schools volunteered to participate in the reflective process and in the writing of this chapter. The process was coordinated by Dr. Ellen Field, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University, and Michèle Andrews, Co-founder and Executive Director of DoorNumberOne.org, the organization running the CAAP. The team met several times to discuss the specific school contexts, successes, and challenges. All conversations were recorded, and transcripts of the discussions inform the Discussion section of the chapter. All participants spoke authentically about their school’s journeys in order to co-learn with each other and with the aim to share their process with schools beyond the CAAP through this publication.

2.1 Southridge School

Southridge School, founded in 1995, is situated on 17 acres in South Surrey, British Columbia, on the unceded native Coast Salish territories of the Kawantlen, Katzie, Tsawwassen, and Semiahmoo First Nations. It serves 680 students in kindergarten through Grade 12/University Entrance. Southridge’s whole school approach has been catalyzed by the head of school, who has made the school’s sustainability initiatives a clear priority.

Under the leadership of the assistant head of school, a team of 16, including faculty, staff, and students, works with the school community across ten areas of impact, including teaching and learning, building and grounds, and school culture. The school’s approach to developing its Environmental Stewardship Plan (ESP) was research-based, using the results of environmental audits completed in 2014 and 2019. With the goal of integrating student-initiated environmental projects into a whole school strategic framework that encompasses all facets of operations, a fundamental cornerstone of the ESP is the belief that coordinated efforts within a common understanding of shared purpose are more impactful than well-intentioned initiatives operating independently from one another. As such, the perspective Southridge will explore in this chapter is a systems approach (as defined by Wals & Mathie, 2022) to the development and implementation of a whole school environmental/climate action plan.

Stemming from its first environmental audit completed in 2014, Southridge positioned its climate action efforts from two distinct and separate perspectives: school operations and student initiatives. Over the next 5 years, numerous initiatives were drawn from the audit and implemented with the intention to become a more environmentally responsible school community. Indeed, the efforts of the school from both perspectives received support from the board of governors, and financial resources were made available to move the school forward. In 2018, and in alignment with the school’s preparation for its 25th anniversary, Southridge looked to the future and began to write the next chapter of its story. With a long-term outlook in their sights, the board of governors and head of school designed a 10 year strategic plan to focus on equipping each student for their path ahead, developing a creative and supportive environment for learning and work, and connecting its diverse community. With a distinct and sincere interest in how the school would prepare its students to become globally aware and engaged citizens, the head of school began to consider the extent to which environmental stewardship would play a role in equipping the school’s students for the future.

In alignment with the school’s mission to educate students who make a difference in the world, the head of school used the 2014 environmental report as a basis to form the content of its next environmental audit. The 2019 audit highlighted many areas of progress the community had made over the 5 years, particularly in the areas of food services and information technology, and it also identified points for continued focus, growth, and improvement (in particular, co-curricular programming, housekeeping services, and waste management).

The points for continued growth and improvement from the 2019 audit report were used in alignment with the 2 year “getting ready” phase of the school’s 10 year strategic plan. From an environmental stewardship point of view, the “getting ready” phase meant creating a mini strategic plan to unite distinct and separate climate action efforts—school operations and student initiatives—in a new and purposeful whole school approach. The beauty of the design process was in how it brought together voices from all areas of the school to engage in thoughtful discussion based on evidence contained in the audit report. Over the course of the next 6 months (from November 2019 to April 2020), a team of 16 people wrote Southridge’s first strategically aligned ESP; and in September 2021, they began to implement the first series of 15 key initiatives.

Even though the output was a comprehensive and engaging ESP, one of the challenges the team faced in writing it was finding common ground on issues that were, up to that point in time, clearly the jurisdiction of only certain people or departments. Welcoming distinct voices into iterative discussions to generate a whole school perspective was a hurdle that created tensions and tested the team’s ability to truly collaborate. It took practice to listen openly to the opinions of nonexperts who did not have practical experience in certain areas. For example, teachers offering their opinions on sustainable purchasing practices the school should be following created an oppositional dynamic that was difficult to overcome. With time and after many honest conversations and authentic group interactions, it became evident that everyone was working toward a common goal. The trust that blossomed from these kinds of interactions helped ease the transition from a disparate approach of well-intentioned initiatives operating independently from one another (and with questionable influence on the school’s environmental culture) to a more impactful whole school systems approach of coordinated efforts around a common understanding of shared purpose.

The implementation of the school’s ESP went very well, largely due to the model of shared leadership it inspired. One of the most significant benefits of taking on a whole school approach to environmental stewardship and climate action is that people recognize that the only way to help move the school forward is to contribute to the execution of the plan. People in designated leadership roles intentionally stepped back from advancing each key initiative on their own, and they provided the space and opportunity for nondesignated leaders to decide how best to approach the initiatives. Team members had more ownership over the plan and felt a greater sense of accomplishment and excitement about the changes that took place over the course of the year, which translated into enthusiasm for continuing the work in the following year. It also garnered appreciation for the work people do in all departments across the school, which helped build an even stronger sense of shared leadership and shared goals.

Southridge administration took some time after the CAAP Year One to align its Environmental Sustainability Plan with the Climate Action Accelerator Strategic Framework. This analysis showed that a systems approach to environmental stewardship is strongly represented in the school’s work on the building and grounds, as well as in other areas of school operations such as sustainable purchasing. It also showed that key initiatives in the Southridge plan are equally represented across Organizational Culture, Collective Learning, and Physical Space.

However, one important area of focus for the future will be providing professional development and education opportunities for board members. An excellent generative discussion at a spring 2022 board meeting revealed a desire to make better-informed environmental and climate action decisions in the future. The current annual board education plan for 2022–2023 has two meetings designated as “environmental.” The first meeting will focus on what it means to shift an organization from using a green initiative-based program to using a regenerative paradigm model. The second meeting will be designed to help position the school’s key environmental performance indicators against industry standards, as defined by progressive Canadian independent schools. In the end, the board will have a greater appreciation for what leading schools across the country are doing and how Southridge can position itself as a contributing member of the growing number of schools that are recognizing their role in creating a regenerative future.

A second area of focus will be on revisiting the vision for the work. In 2020, the committee responsible for creating the ESP spent considerable time thinking about its vision to help the school have a better understanding of possible future directions. Taking into account that the initiatives the committee planned to undertake at the time were relatively modest, the original vision read, “Given its emphasis on making a difference in the world, Southridge intentionally and proactively contributes to an environmentally sustainable future.” Southridge is reconsidering this vision statement in light of its work in the CAAP. Providing some education for the board of governors in 2022–2023 will help facilitate that process. Since developing a compelling vision will have a financial impact on the school, it is important for the board to possess sufficient background knowledge about climate action and environmental regeneration to contribute in a well-informed way to the development of an appropriately positioned vision that is more aspirational and compelling than what is currently in place.

2.2 Hillfield Strathallan College

Hillfield Strathallan College (HSC) is a Canadian independent school with 1280 learners from prekindergarten to Grade 12. The campus is nestled on 50 acres in the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas. This land is covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, which was an agreement between the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabek, and other Indigenous nations to share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. HSC is committed to honoring this covenant by working alongside Indigenous neighbors and building a sustainable relationship with the land. In this chapter, the work of reimagining and re-developing the campus grounds as a Learning Landscape will be explored as a way to facilitate building a culture of sustainability and integrating it into curricular and co-curricular programs.

2.2.1 A Not-So-Novel Idea…

There was a time, not too long ago, when Canadian schools did not have gymnasiums (New World Encyclopedia, 2022). As surprising as it may seem, school assemblies, theatrical performances, and physical education classes did not have a specialized instructional space a century ago. Fast-forward one hundred years, and gyms have become an essential school feature based on their many educational benefits. However, there’s another potential piece of school infrastructure that has been overlooked, one that can more significantly impact student learning and engagement. Over the last two decades, research has shown that looking outside the school to the school grounds as a learning space provides a highly effective opportunity to increase student learning and wellness (numerous articles within Children and Nature Network Research Library). In 2009, HSC set out to create outdoor classroom spaces and biodiversity enhancements that would fully integrate into all grades, understanding that this could become the twenty-first century’s educational innovation. While the built infrastructure covers approximately half of the campus, the remaining land consists of lawns, playing fields dotted with ornamental trees, and an apple orchard remnant of the farm that operated on the land a century ago. Reintroducing native biodiversity led to the emergence of a new vision of the campus as a Learning Landscape. Rather than a passive backdrop of open space, the grounds are now being treated as a new piece of school infrastructure for twenty-first-century learners. Its features support and enhance student learning and social development, academic achievement, creativity, focus, and mood, along with staff job satisfaction and wellness, climate change resilience and adaptation, and more.

2.2.2 Meet the Learning Landscape

The typical unbuilt campus area, along with the property surrounding many suburban North American schools, has lawns, some ornamental plantings, and sports fields lined with invasive nonnative trees. The Learning Landscape re-envisions these areas to leverage new opportunities for growth and development in students across all ages and subject areas. It began with reintroducing naturalized areas, which act as co-teacher, provide an ecological function to support local biodiversity, and even help mitigate some impacts of climate change. The landscape includes an arboretum and living laboratory, a conservation corridor, nature sanctuaries, wellness spaces, and outdoor classrooms. This work also affords using these spaces for year-round outdoor activity and physical education classes.

2.2.3 Setting the Course

In 2009, HSC embarked on a strategic plan with the goal of becoming a leader in sustainability and environmental responsibility. The school leadership opened the door to student and staff initiatives related to biodiversity or sustainability. Initiatives were supported and encouraged, whether they were tied to curriculum, infrastructure change, or day-to-day facility decisions. A global body of research on the impact of outdoor learning and activity in nature has developed in the last 15–20 years; it provides the rationale for looking outdoors at the unbuilt parts of campus as a Learning Landscape (see Children and Nature Network research library (n.d.) for numerous research articles on the benefits of outdoor learning: https://research.childrenandnature.org/).

2.2.4 Wayfinding Led by Students

Staff and students across HSC have played an important role in developing new landscape elements. Students are enthusiastic about the tasks, and, more importantly, their involvement builds skills and agency that give them hope for their future in a rapidly changing world. Younger students thrive in the Learning Landscape, and the revised junior school science program is based on a gardening curriculum. Grade 6 students have been proposing campus biodiversity enhancement projects for 5 years. Grade 9 students investigate what actions are taken on the campus that could support particular species at risk. Senior biology students stratify, germinate, and plant specialized plant species native to Ontario, and they are developing a campus native tree inventory to then calculate greenhouse gas sequestration potentials. There are boundless opportunities for creative, imaginative, experiential, and hands-on learning, as well as opportunities to collaborate with community partners. Students have a deep bond and well-developed sense of place and purpose, and they know that their school is solving problems locally and modeling solutions to global challenges.

Cross-curricular integration, inquiry, and project-based learning work well in natural spaces. The HSC campus showcases biodiversity and leverages green infrastructure for cost savings and climate change resilience and mitigation. Still, above all else, it enhances student achievement and both student and teacher health and well-being. Ongoing naturalization projects at HSC directly support the 2021–2030 United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration initiative and the broader Sustainable Development Goals. These projects help represent and build an understanding of the local presettlement habitats on the site while shifting focus to situating experiential learning on campus and reducing greenhouse emissions from busing that would have been used for field trips. Just as gymnasiums went from “new concept” to “essential school facility” through the twentieth century, HSC is looking forward to a future where a Learning Landscape will be a crucial part of every school, and all students and faculty will have the opportunity to reap its many benefits. A cultural shift is happening that is purposely and deliberately supported by leadership and driven by the initiative of staff and students.

HSC joined the CAAP in the first cohort of schools to lead system-wide thinking and to become change agents to model what is possible. There is a commitment to continue to leverage their growing capacity to make better decisions, stimulate a more comprehensive whole school approach to strategies, fully integrate student voices, and collaborate and share best practices that they aspire to co-design and implement in a community of like-minded leading independent schools across Canada. The CAAP is a platform for sharing ideas, strategies, and best practices, and, equally important, it is a space where school leaders can articulate and discuss what is really meant by bold action that inspires hope for a better future. Peer schools in the CAAP will take back a stronger and more compelling voice to individual schools and continue to build the momentum of a whole school approach within a collective of transparent and shared CAIS (Canadian Accredited Independent School) approaches. Since joining CAAP, there has been heightened appreciation at HSC that every degree of warming matters, every year matters, every choice matters, every action matters, and hope matters.

2.2.5 Compelling Vision

The HSC Campus Master Plan and Strategic Plan 2022 offer a response to the climate emergency, in particular on the theme of purposeful and sustainable learning environments. This response ensures that the entire community is aligned with the overall goals of significantly reducing the school’s footprint, role-modeling regenerative behaviors, and working toward a carbon-negative future. It is recognized that no part of this problem will be solved in isolation, and everyone in the community will have to innovate, support, and sacrifice to achieve these goals.

2.2.6 Organizational Culture

HSC is a large and physically dispersed set of four schools, all operating within one school, and with a very large catchment area. HSC is working to ensure that the values of sustainability and climate action are woven throughout the school. Implementing concepts from the CAAP, such as an overall climate action plan, sustainability survey, ongoing professional development, communications, and student leadership roles, reinforces the school’s commitment to environmental sustainability and climate action.

2.2.7 Collective Learning

HSC is bridging curriculum areas and looking for continuums that will thread through curricular and co-curricular learning and strengthen climate actions. HSC is a platinum EcoSchool and has established student committees to lead student actions. The sometimes-hidden talents of students, faculty, staff, and community members are being tapped. Programming is emerging and evolving to be more data-driven, action-oriented, and project-based and, as a result, is having more impact on more students. Preparing students for an uncertain future includes developing skills and mindsets that are aligned with a progressive school ground element like the Learning Landscape, where they have agency to actively support biodiversity and climate change adaptation, mitigation, and resilience and to do so on the other side of their classroom wall. Planting oak savannah species, managing runoff into waterways and wetlands, and investigating new solutions for increasing food security are examples that enrich the student experience.

2.2.8 Physical Space

In 2007, HSC began to focus on sustainability with initiatives to measure and sort waste, replace light bulbs, consume less, and investigate energy reduction behaviors that could be implemented across campus. Now, HSC is turning its attention to actively model regenerative systems and infrastructure, including gardens, food forests, representative natural habitats, solar arrays, and electrification, and ensure the entire 50 acres are used as outdoor classrooms and an intentional campus-wide Learning Landscape that serves desired learning outcomes. A baseline greenhouse gas inventory was established from 2019 data that will drive many of the operational decisions moving forward. During the last major capital campaign and construction of a new senior school, climate action-related elements were introduced. A Green School Steering Committee was established to determine priorities and renew conversations around energy conservation, waste reduction, green infrastructure, and other ideas that environmentally offered “more good” rather than just “less bad.” Several significant stormwater bioswales have been added to intercept parking lot run-off, and building features were planned that support sustainable innovations in the future.

Moving forward, HSC will continue to strive to be a leader in climate action and environmental sustainability through education, construction, and ongoing operations. The large catchment area and corresponding bus fleet remain a challenge to resolve. There is a commitment that each new building on campus will be designed and operated to a very high environmental standard. Similar to the learning landscapes outside, the built environment will be used as a learning tool for environmental stewardship and climate change mitigation. This will serve current and future students across every grade and curriculum area by enhancing and enriching educational experiences, supporting biodiversity and human wellness, and improving the impacts of climate change on campus and within the community. HSC intends to make a meaningful impact on the built environment on campus to support the goal of carbon neutrality by 2030.

2.3 Trinity College School

Trinity College School (TCS), founded in 1865, is situated on a one-hundred-acre campus in Port Hope, Ontario, on the traditional territories of the Wendake-Niowentsïo, Mississauga, Anishinabe Waki, and Haudenosaunee. The student population of approximately 600 students from grades five through 12/Advanced Placement includes over three hundred boarding students and approximately three hundred day students. TCS has been working on environmental sustainability initiatives since the early 1970s and has taken a whole school approach since the mid-2000s. It has certified with EcoSchools Canada since 2012, achieving its platinum level each year since 2017, and has received several awards, including the Canada Green Building Council’s “Greenest School in Canada” award in 2018 and a Canada Clean 50 Top Project award in 2019. The following will provide an overview of the TCS approach to greening school culture through incentivized student challenges, sustainability awards, the MOGO (more good) framework, a portfolio of special curriculum initiatives occurring beyond the academic classroom, and retrofitting aged infrastructure to fight climate change and turn awareness to action.

In the early 2000s, with global headlines broadcasting ever-growing concerns about environmental degradation and leading independent schools in Canada and the United States beginning to invest in school greening programs, TCS established a formalized environmental coordinator position. Over the next 20 years, the role and its reach evolved, as did the approach to achieving meaningful change. The leadership provided through the position has helped shift the lens from project-based one-offs to business-style sustainability planning to a whole school model situated in the overall TCS strategic plan, with responsive strategic directions and both board and budgetary support. TCS transitioned from “yes, we do Earth Day and recycle” to working in all elements of “green campus, green curriculum, green culture” to asking, “how can our school systems regenerate our living systems such that we have healthy people and a healthy planet in the future?”

Initially, project-based, student-focused initiatives such as the junior school outdoor classroom program and senior school green cup challenge were implemented to transform environmental activities from fringe to normalized. Both initiatives strive to engage and empower all students instead of just a select club, and they directly support the school’s mission to develop habits of the heart and mind for a life of purpose and service. Both have also flourished over the better part of two decades through vision, perseverance, hope, and reflective adaptation.

It became apparent in the late 2000s that a much broader approach was needed in order to ensure TCS was progressing on the path to being a green school (Chapman, 2012). A facilities-focused environmental audit was completed in 2012 to establish a baseline of utility usage and other footprint components such as waste, transportation, and purchasing. TCS’s first sustainability plan was created in response to the audit with 140 goals set across ten target areas under a new, multi-stakeholder-created sustainability vision and mission. Throughout the mid-2010s, a multi-stakeholder sustainability committee was established with youth and adults from the school. The committee identified and implemented many initiatives identified as “low-hanging fruit,” accomplishing 75% of the goals in the plan. See a list of some of those initiatives in the Table 7.1.

Table 1 Table 7.1 TCS early sustainability initiatives

TCS came to a time of reckoning, however, after winning two significant green school awards. The celebration came together with questioning, “What did these accolades really mean? Were we really walking the talk? If there were more impactful and innovative ways that we could improve, how could we be the greenest school?” The school has come a long way in achieving the goal of normalizing green and sustainable practices in the school culture and reducing the campus footprint, but work is needed to continue to make green visible, desirable, and doable within the school culture.

A multi-stakeholder barriers analysis was conducted to determine what might be holding TCS back from a greener campus and greener curriculum. The analysis determined that blocks to walking the green school talk continued to exist, and there would need to be new strategies to address these identified areas. Many of the barriers were typical: time, budget, competition between aims, and linear, siloed approaches. Some of the barriers to a greener culture were unexpected. The insights gained, from students in particular, indicated that appropriate “green” behavior was being limited by certain mindsets (privilege, entitlement, apathy, guilt paralysis, and rogue elements), unsustainable lifestyles, incorrect or limited knowledge, and, most surprisingly, peer pressure. Furthermore, the very concepts of “green” and “sustainable” were still unclear to many and/or linked to actions that made people feel restricted in their lives.

TCS reframed the path forward in the image of a three-peaked mountain (Fig. 7.2). The present was described as being at basecamp on sustainability mountain, with the school having already climbed for some time and now looking toward climbing further over the various boulders and crevasses on the way to a green campus, green curriculum, and green culture. The MOGO (do more good, not less bad) campaigns were born as a motivating principle, and systems-thinking workshops were piloted for students and teachers. A new sustainability audit was initiated to showcase the last decade’s improvements and provide direction for a large-scale sustainable infrastructure fundraising campaign. Recent infrastructure projects aimed at reducing the school’s greenhouse gas footprint included adding solar hot water preheating to one of the boiler systems, doubling the solar photovoltaic array such that it will produce 10–12% of campus electricity, and installing electric vehicle charging stations.

Fig. 7.2

TCS path forward as a three-peaked mountain. Note: Image on the right is of Reed’s (2007) spectrum of conventional to regenerative design

TCS has mapped its many initiatives along a spectrum based on Bill Reed’s description of conventional practices to sustainability through to restoration and regeneration (2007) (Fig. 7.3). In doing so, their community more clearly understands the opportunities to stretch their activities further.

Fig. 7.3

TCS activities mapped according to Bill Reed’s conventional to regenerative scale (2007). Note: Color coding aligns with Reed’s (2007) color coding in Fig. 7.2

As TCS emerged from the COVID-dictated programming lull, joining the CAAP provided a meaningful opportunity to share learning and mentor schools in earlier phases of the whole school approach planning. Most significantly, the discourse on and sharing of regenerative practice research has led to a paradigm shift: the top of sustainability mountain is in fact beyond green or sustainable; it is regeneration. This thinking is now informing the development of a new climate action and sustainability plan which will add regenerative elements to the mitigation and adaptation tactics. A new tagline, “healthy planet healthy people,” has been launched to guide student, staff, and community focus. This tagline will help unify programming and integrate diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice into the climate action and sustainability plan.

3 Discussion

This section outlines common processes or approaches across the schools that we noted were important for moving the schools along their climate action and whole school journeys. The section is followed by a discussion of shared challenges and emerging opportunities.

3.1 Commonalities

3.1.1 Regenerative Practice as Paradigm Shift

Through our conversations, it became increasingly clear that all three schools are approaching a climate action-focused whole school approach as a paradigm shift or “whole system redesign” (Wals & Mathie, 2022) throughout the organizational culture, collective learning, and physical spaces of their schools. The teachers and administrators spoke of their aims and hopes for their work in the CAAP to bring them closer to transforming their schools toward a regenerative model of education and school operations. Hillfield Strathallan College and Trinity College School both have long histories of environmental sustainability. Their participation in the CAAP, along with their new paradigm of regeneration and commitment to be leaders, has them currently exploring how to integrate their climate action more centrally in their strategic plans. Southridge School, while in an earlier stage of its climate action journey, is approaching its strategic plan in an integrated and relational way by considering multiple global influences: the climate crisis, Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation, and pluralism, which includes equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice considerations. All three schools discussed the importance of holistic strategic plans that link student well-being, equity, diversity, and inclusion, and the climate crisis in order for the school to be responsive and act in regenerative ways to current societal challenges.

The conversation also discussed the challenge of working with multi-year strategic plans that do not traditionally allow for flexibility within the timeframe to adapt to emerging crises. These strategic plans try to balance the integrated and relational components while also being specific enough to identify objectives and strategies. Questions such as, “At what levels do these global influencers affect the school and should be reflected in the strategic plan?” and, “How do we ensure objectives are specific but will also still be relevant in a few years’ time?” were discussed. Through discussions with the schools and some of the illustrative examples provided, these schools are addressing the need to respond to emerging and urgent climate challenges not simply as something to be implemented, a box to be ticked, or a siloed program, but rather as a catalyst of fundamental change that impacts all aspects of their educational program and operations. This approach requires the involvement of all actors that affect or are affected by a school’s activities, including competencies such as systems thinking, inter- and transdisciplinary thinking, and anticipatory thinking, alongside attention to socio-emotional aspects and dealing with anxiety and fear (Wals & Mathie, 2022). This type of thinking represents the amplifying opportunity when schools take climate action seriously.

3.1.2 Leadership and Organizational Culture

For these three schools, and the rest of the schools in the CAAP, the challenge will be to ensure that the paradigm shift of regeneration becomes an unshakeable part of the school culture. To be successful, more and more of the administration, staff, students, and parents will need to shift their own mindsets. In our discussions with the three schools, a committed principal/head of school was considered essential for schools to take on a whole school approach to climate action. We discussed the many competing priorities and complexities that school administrators must balance. A commitment to climate action from the principal is critical for continually prioritizing its importance and seeing how climate change education and action intersect with other priorities such as equity, diversity, and inclusion, fundraising campaigns, or wellness initiatives. The consistent commitment of a principal will ensure that climate change is embedded into strategic plans; included in professional learning plans, accountabilities, hiring, and orientation processes; integrated into the physical space of the school; and communicated internally and externally.

The schools also discussed the importance of an inclusive and representative process in the development of a strategic plan and the act of sharing leadership in its implementation. One teacher reflected on her school’s journey to becoming more systemic and reflective: “Twenty years ago, the adults viewed the school system as the students, building, and grounds and that somehow the adults were outside of the system.” She noted, “Now, it is not the case; we look at the staff, board, and parents as part of our school system.” These three schools seem to be taking a systemic approach where they are considering key aspects of schooling (curriculum, pedagogy and learning, professional development, school-community relationships, school practices, ethos, vision, and leadership) simultaneously (Wals & Mathie, 2022).

The schools approaching climate action as a regenerative paradigm shift through a whole school approach aligns with previous schools’ successes on whole school sustainability. Some of the critical factors for school success within whole school approaches to sustainability, as evidenced through case studies, evaluation, and research, include taking a future-oriented perspective on the school’s culture and practice, embracing complexity over direct problem-solving, and distributed leadership (Tilbury & Gavin, 2022). The schools participating in the CAAP seem to be demonstrating these factors in their progress through the program.

3.2 Challenges

For all three schools, integrating climate change into the curriculum remains a challenge to varying degrees. For Southridge, the province of British Columbia (BC) has a reformed competency-based curriculum that moves away from content knowledge descriptors. BC teachers have indicated that there are more opportunities to integrate climate change education and action. The other two schools in the province of Ontario identified the rigidity of the curriculum as limiting for integrating transdisciplinary climate action inquiry projects within instruction classes, as well as the limits of climate change expectations within the curriculum. This is not unique in Canada or to secondary schools attempting to implement whole school approaches in other countries (Bosevska & Kriewaldt, 2020). A national study on climate change education practices in Canada showed that there is limited class time spent on climate change content with between 33% (closed-sample) and 59% (open-sample) of teachers reporting teaching any climate change in a national survey. For the teachers who do integrate climate change content, most students experience 1–10 h of instruction per year or semester (Field et al., 2019).

All three schools also identified knowledge gaps among school actors as barriers. Southridge is actively facilitating environmental professional development at focused school board meetings to ensure school decision-makers are informed of the urgency of the climate crisis. Knowledge gaps among parents, staff, and teachers were also identified as a barrier by all three schools. These gaps align with findings from a national climate change education study, which found that only 32% of closed-sample teachers feel that they have the knowledge and skills to teach about climate change, indicating the need for professional development, classroom resources, and curriculum policy (Field et al., 2019).

Going forward, schools will face many other challenges in achieving regenerative and responsive systems change. Reflecting on the most effective leverage points for systems interventions, Meadows (1999) identifies rules, incentives, information access, and feedback loops as necessary for a system to go through a paradigm shift. Applying a regenerative lens to existing policies and reflecting on the reward and recognition systems for faculty, staff, and students are two ways to help drive systems change. Another area of particular interest for the CAAP leaders is in the area of feedback loops and information. The CAAP leaders are looking to create a dashboard of metrics across the three dimensions of culture, learning, and physical space for schools to identify goals and track and communicate their progress toward their short- and longer-term climate action plan goals.

In a review of the schools’ journeys through the CAAP, the schools’ commitments to the CAAP and their whole school approach will most likely result in the schools having higher-quality school improvement processes and a more coherent organization structure with greater potential to support pedagogical and teaching practices around climate action than other schools based on comprehensive research conducted on performances of whole school approaches and school improvement (Morgen et al., 2019).

4 Conclusion

These three schools are exceptional examples of motivated schools that are voluntarily taking climate action seriously. Unfortunately, climate change education and action often rely on the competence, dedication, commitment, and enthusiasm of devoted teachers and administrators (Eames, 2017; Nicholls, 2016; Whitehouse, 2017), and there is a lack of regulation or policy accountability. All three schools recognized and discussed at length that educational change and culture shifts are slow processes, yet they see that students and the world need climate action now. They strive to be sites of regenerative practice in a time of existential vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The CAAP is still in the early stages, and the schools enrolled are working to achieve both an understanding and an application of regenerative whole school climate action. The aspirational vision to catalyze climate action not only in schools but through them in the community and society will certainly take time to unfold. In the meantime, these schools are important sites for educators, administrators, students, parents, and communities to learn from and be inspired by as we all forge ahead to build a viable and healthy future.