I first encountered sustainability in the Special Topics in Education course Education in and for Social and Environmental Transformation, co-presented by Prof. Blane Harvey and Stephanie Leit. At that stage, the course inspired me to use the concept in my academic arguments, and I understood sustainability primarily as a theoretical idea to be studied, defined, and perhaps added to existing frameworks. My second, and more immersive, experience came through the Office for Sustainability at McGill University as part of the Sustainability Education Fellowship (SEF, 2025). I was privileged to partner with Prof. Anila Asghar in redesigning two courses: EDTL 520:Perspectives on Knowledge in Mathematics and Science (Fall 2025) and EDEC 646/647: Sociocultural and Epistemic Understandings of Science and Mathematics (Winter 2026). Prof. Asghar made the journey genuinely participatory and inclusive. Through this fellowship and through the way she designed the curriculum, I had the opportunity to join the course as a guest speaker and facilitate a workshop on digital technologies and cellphilm, which we used as creative tools to engage students and mobilize knowledge beyond the university. In one course, students created ten cellphilms and built a shared “cellphilm bank” to use and adapt in their own classrooms. It was there that sustainability began to shift for me, from an abstract concept to a lived experience, practiced and co-created through relationships, dialogue, and action.
What stood out most in the fellowship was its deeply multidisciplinary nature. I found myself learning alongside colleagues from medicine, dentistry, engineering, music, mathematics, statistics, and education. This diversity unsettled my earlier assumptions about where sustainability “belongs.” I began to see more clearly that sustainability and 21st-century skills cannot be housed within any single discipline; they are inherently collective, relational, and interconnected. Dialogue became central, not as a formal requirement, but as a necessity. Rather than working in silos or repeating conversations in isolation, the fellowship created space to listen, exchange, and build on one another’s thinking. I became more aware of how much untapped creativity and insight already exist within academic communities, and how rarely we create the conditions for those ideas to genuinely meet, grow, and transform.
One of the most significant shifts for me was in how I came to understand sustainability in education itself. I began to see that sustainability is not simply a topic to add to a syllabus or a module to be covered; it is a way of designing learning that asks whose knowledge matters, what values are being reinforced, and what kinds of futures we are preparing learners to imagine and build. This raised uncomfortable but necessary questions for me: sustainability for whom, by whom, and toward which futures? From this perspective, sustainable education becomes student-centered, place-based, culturally responsive, and interdisciplinary. It moves beyond top-down approaches focused only on goals, content, and assessment, and instead begins with purpose, values, and competencies, asking not only what students know, but what they can do, practice, and become. I started to notice how the visible elements of curriculum are only the surface layer above deeper assumptions about power, worldview, and relationality.
This way of thinking resonated strongly with what is often described as 21st-century learning and the four Cs: collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and creativity. Both 21st-century skills and sustainability are futures-oriented, systems-based, values-driven, and relational. In our course redesign, we intentionally integrated creativity, collaboration, ethical reasoning, reflexivity, and responsible risk-taking. We aimed to challenge the idea of learning as something to be consumed and reproduced, and instead to frame it as something practiced, enacted, and shared. In this model, assessment becomes less about recall and more about evidence of engagement and contribution, through projects, events, community partnerships, and collective work. We also came to understand that discomfort, iteration, trust, and reflexivity are not side effects of learning, but its essential conditions.
These insights shaped how we approached course redesign. A central question guiding our work became how to integrate sustainability, Indigenous epistemologies, 21st-century skills, and interdisciplinary thinking in ways that move beyond theory into practice. Rather than treating these domains as separate, we invited students to explore their interconnections through experiential learning. To support this, we introduced cellphilm-making and visual methodologies as creative, participatory tools. At the other workshop, we introduced a maker activity using recycled materials to produce new items. These approaches offered students concrete ways to communicate complex ideas within educational settings and broader social contexts, while fostering reflection, collaboration, and storytelling. I was particularly struck by how these activities could “travel,” beyond McGill walls, allowing students to adapt what they were learning to their own teaching contexts.
Developing leadership was another important thread. Students were encouraged to step outside their comfort zones, take creative risks, and experiment with participatory visual methods. During a short, intensive workshop, they produced a diverse collection of cellphilms that reflected curiosity, openness, and a willingness to learn through doing. Together, these works formed a shared “cellphilm bank” that students could draw on in their future classrooms. The process invited them to identify a problem, explore possible solutions, and communicate their ideas visually, followed by written reflections and the design of follow-up classroom activities. Watching this unfold, I was reminded that meaningful learning often emerges not from certainty, but from experimentation, vulnerability, and care.
Through this fellowship, I came to understand that sustainability in education is not something we teach, but something we practice. It is enacted through pedagogies that value relationality, interdisciplinarity, participation, care, and accountability. It integrates cognitive, emotional, and embodied ways of knowing. Most importantly, it shifts our attention from preserving institutions or optimizing systems toward protecting relationships and keeping futures open. In this sense, education becomes one of the primary sites where our responsibility to one another, to the planet, and to future generations is either realized or quietly lost.
December, 2025