SUSTAINABILITY IN SCHOOLS
The Sustainable Schools WA Alliance – Department of Education
GETTING STARTED WITH SUSTAINABILITY IN SCHOOLS
AAEE is the secretariat for the Australian Education for Sustainability Alliance.
This is an alliance of organisations in the education, union, youth and environment sectors that want all Australians to have access to the skills, practices and values of sustainability, through the education system and throughout life.We wanted to find the best way to empower you, your students and your peers – in the classroom, the school and the entire community – with the tools to help Australia become more sustainable. We surveyed more than 5,000 teachers, curriculum coordinators and principals from government and non-government schools across the country, to find out how we can help.
More than 90 per cent of you agree that sustainability is important, of value to students, and should be integrated into the curriculum. A further 60 per cent of you said you were interested in including sustainability in your teaching – but you asked for assistance to kick start sustainability teaching at your school. Essentially, you asked for a getting started guide.
We created this resource in response to your needs. It is a portal to direct you to high quality education resources, case studies focused on how to create change, and information on how to link it all back to the curriculum – in an accessible, direct way.
This guide – Getting Started with Sustainability in Schools – is for you. We encourage you to contribute ‘teacher ready’ resources if possible through the About Us section of the website.
Please make the most of it and share it widely.
Learning across the curriculum mapping
These documents showcase the content descriptions and elaborations for the Australian Curriculum that address the Sustainability cross-curriculum priority.
The Australian Curriculum has a three-dimensional structure encompassing disciplinary knowledge, general capabilities; and cross-curriculum priorities.
The Australian Curriculum identifies sustainability as a key area to be addressed for the benefit of both individuals and Australia as a whole. As such, sustainability has been included as a cross-curriculum priority in the Australian Curriculum and is intended to enrich the curriculum through the development of considered and focused content that fits naturally within learning areas.
This cross-curriculum priority enables teachers to deliver the learning area content at the same time as students develop knowledge, understandings and skills about learning how to live more sustainably.
The Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) has mapped the content descriptions and elaborations for the Australian Curriculum with advice from our members to demonstrate the connections between sustainability and core concepts in the Australian Curriculum.
Elaborations which are italicized are new and not cited in ACARA’s Australian Curriculum. AAEE thanks Dr Sue Elliot and members in workshops for making these available.
This work is intended to assist teachers in preparing and using appropriate classroom materials with a sustainability focus.
We encourage teachers to expand on the ideas here and to contribute them to future editions of this AAEE resource. Please send contributions through to admin@aaee.org.au