Scaling Deep With a Design Lab Process: Community-School Partnerships to Develop Leaders for Sustainability

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  In Virtual iPresentation Only: SIG-Educational Change Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

This mixed methods research explores how design thinking enables schools and communities to co-create 21st century learning models that support social-ecological resilience and build leadership capacity for sustainability. The project aims to form a Canada-wide partnership with academic collaborators and organizations to develop learner skills and sustainability leadership. Using a social innovation process, we co-design local 'experiments' that benefit partner organizations and inform our research. Employing design thinking, we foster interdisciplinary collaboration across education, organization studies, natural sciences, psychology, and philosophy. Our goals include co-designing and analyzing school-community partnership experiments, generating insights for student learning and teacher training, and facilitating dialogue across a Canada-wide network. This paper presents early findings from a pilot study, examining students' nature connectedness and learning skills.

Authors

• Elizabeth C. Kurucz, University of Guelph

• Catherine Hands, Brock University

• Spencer Martens, University of Guelph

• Karin Archer, Let's Talk Science