Keynote Session: Envisioning Sustainability through Teaching and Learning, with Dr. Alison Staudinger and Dr. David Voelker 

“Our house is on fire.”

What would it mean to take seriously climate justice activists’ call to action as a higher education community, especially in the way we teach and learn? And, secondarily, is doing this work, is building another world, possible without turning that fire on ourselves, without burnout? 

We invite the SCSU community to think about the challenge and promise of “sustainability” along with us in this keynote. How have scholars, including at SCSU, advanced and questioned the notion of “sustainability” and integrated it into the classroom? What do we want to “sustain” and why? Alongside ecological notions of the term, we’ll consider what it means for faculty to sustain themselves and others (including students), particularly in a context that seems to be one of never-ending crises, including of course the Covid-19 pandemic. David Voelker will examine whether we might want to move “beyond sustainability” and what sort of ways of knowing, learning, and teaching this might require. Alison Staudinger will question whether perfectionist tendencies may be holding us back from reconfiguring our classrooms and campuses around building the types of messy, productive, just collectivities who might be equipped to address the major challenges of our times.

Although these challenges are daunting, faculty have power in their classrooms and in their workplaces, especially at the department level, to emerge from this pandemic not with a “new normal” but with a re-imagined university that is both deeply sustainable and capable of sustaining us.