Teaching about Food, Water and Energy in the context of Sustainability: Opportunities and connections with the InTeGrate STEP center

Understanding trade-offs and interactions between water, energy, and food production is crucial to understanding many issues of sustainability faced by society in our changing environment. This interdisciplinary intersection brings together educators from a variety of professional communities to address the grand challenges associated with teaching about the Earth in the context of societal issues. It also serves as a conceptual framework to describe and aid in addressing complex interrelationships associated with coupled human-natural systems at local, regional, and global scales. The inter-linkages between water, energy, and food means that changes in one system can have far-reaching impacts in others, and teaching in this area requires a focus on systems thinking. It also necessitates broadening the conversation around education and education research to attend to issues of equity, voice, and environmental justice.

Increasing capacity through public literacy and preparing the future workforce to address these challenges are key goals of the NSF STEP Center InTeGrate, and associated partner projects. The project features interdisciplinary materials that engage students in learning about the Earth by focusing on pressing topics and using evidence-based teaching practice. These materials are designed for both science and non-science majors at the upper and lower division and have been rigorously reviewed and tested in the classroom. Topics include Environmental Justice and Freshwater Resources, The Wicked Problem of Global Food Security, Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability, Food as the Foundation for Healthy Communities, Sustaining Soil Resources through Local Decision Making, and Water, Agriculture and Sustainability. We invite you to learn more about the materials, ongoing work in this area, and to become part of our expanding communities of educators working to address these issues. More information is available at: serc.carleton.edu/integrate