The Expanded Student Engagement Project (ESE) has developed three comprehensive inventories which aim to increase student knowledge of sustainability-related course content and increase student engagement in on- and off-campus, curricular, and non-curricular sustainability projects at the University of Toronto (U of T). The first is a sustainability course inventory (SCI) generated using keyword search based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is the first SCI that has been based on the SDGs. The inventory identified 2022 unique sustainability courses and found that SDG 13 had the greatest representation and SDG 6 had the least. The second inventory is a community-engaged learning (CEL) sustainability inventory which found 154 sustainability-focused CEL courses and identified 86 faculty members who teach sustainability CEL. Finally, an inventory of sustainability co-curricular and extracurricular opportunities revealed that U of T has 67 sustainability-focused student groups and identified 263 sustainability-focused opportunities. These inventories are an important foundation for future initiatives to increase student engagement in sustainability on campus and in the community. The ESE will integrate this data into U of T’s course management system and use the inventories to develop a new sustainability pathways program.

Globally, there are significant challenges to meeting built environment performance targets. The gaps found between the predicted performance of new or retrofit buildings and their actual performance impede an understanding of how to achieve these targets. This paper points to the importance of reliable and informative building performance assessments. We argue that if we are to make progress in achieving our climate goals, we need to reframe built environment performance with a shift to net positive goals, while recognising the equal importance of human and environmental outcomes. This paper presents a simple conceptual framework for built environment performance assessment and identifies three performance gaps: (i) Prediction Gap (e.g., modelled and measured energy, water consumption); (ii) Expectations Gap (e.g., occupant expectations in pre- and post-occupancy evaluations); and, (iii) Outcomes Gap (e.g., thermal comfort measurements and survey results). We question which of measured or experienced performance is the ‘true’ performance of the built environment. We further identify a “Prediction Paradox”, indicating that it may not be possible to achieve more accurate predictions of building performance at the early design stage. Instead, we propose that Performance Gaps be seen as creative resources, used to improve the resilience of design strategies through continuous monitoring.

Bendor, R., D. Maggs, R. Peake, J. Robinson, and S. Williams. 2017. The imaginary worlds of sustainability: observations from an interactive art installation. Ecology and Society 22(2):17. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09240-220217

To address the challenge of achieving social learning in support of transformative change to sustainability, this paper develops an analytical framework that applies a social practice theory (SPT) lens to illuminate the constituent elements and dynamics of social learning in the context of transdisciplinary coproduction for sustainability transitions. Adopting an SPT approach affords a means of interpreting concrete practices at the local scale and exploring the potential for scaling them up. This framework is then applied to a real-world case at the urban neighbourhood scale in order to illustrate how social learning unfolded in a grassroots transdisciplinary coproduction process focused on climate action. We find that a social practice perspective illuminates the material and nonmaterial dimensions of the relationship between social learning and transdisciplinary coproduction. In decoupling these properties from individual human agency, the SPT perspective affords a means of tracing their emergence among social actors, generating a deeper understanding of how social learning arises and effects change, and sustainability can be reinforced.

This metadata relates to an electronic version of an article published in Journal of education for teaching, 2007, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 137-147. Journal of education for teaching is available online at informaworldTM at http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a777770806