Teaching the Sustainable Development Goals to Young Citizens (10-16 years) A Focus on Teaching Hope, Respect, Empathy and Advocacy in Schools

 Section 1;  1. You, me and mother nature: We are all connected.;  2. Transformative education: Teaching respect, empathy, advocacy and hope in schools;  3. A human rights-based approach to teaching the sustainable development goals;  Section 2;  4. Engaging with the causes and solutions of poverty (SDG 1);  5. Food for thought: Zero hunger (SDG 2);  6. A time of hope, a time for empathy: Ensuring the health and well-being of students’ transition from primary to post-primary school (SDG 3);  7. Education (SDG 4): the building block for all SDGs;  8. Teaching about gender: Feminist hope and praxis for the future (SDG 5);  9. Blue gold: clean water and sanitation (SDG 6);  10. Powering our lives with secure, equitable and sustainable energy sources (SDG 7);  11. Decent work and economic growth (SDG 8);  12. Building a better future through industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG 9);  13. Bridging gaps though reducing inequality (SDG 10);  14. Learning to live sustainably: Lessons from sustainable communities (SDG 11);  15. Responsible consumption and production: think before you buy (SDG 12);  16. Teaching and learning about, through and for climate action and climate justice (SDG 13);  17. Life Under Water (SDG 14);  18. Life on Land  (SDG 15);  19. Peace, Justice and strong institutions: Envisioning alternative pathways (SDG 16);  20. Partnerships for transformation :Teaching (SDG 17)

Biography

Anne M. Dolan is a lecturer in primary geography with the Department of Learning, Society and Religious Education in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Powerful Primary Geography and editor of Teaching Climate Change in Primary Schools. Formerly a primary school teacher, Anne maintains a strong interest in creative and student-based pedagogies.

This volume offers a thoughtful, constructive and practical resource for teachers to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals into their daily practice. It provides guidance on each of the goals while making the connections between them. It sets out creative lesson plans and projects that nurture awareness and agency. We share a responsibility to get the SDGs back on track to make our world more inclusive, sustainable, just and peaceful. This can happen through learning how to learn and how to care together.
Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education

The book is a masterclass on how to introduce the Sustainable Development Goals to Young people.  The book illustrates beautifully the authors' dedication to teaching and learning while applying their craft to UNESCO's  Transforming  Education agenda. The authors carefully embed human and nature rights around scientific knowledge and learning. The agenda for transformative education outlined in this book will help students to understand how sustainable development for all life and the planet itself can be achieved.
Patrick Paul Walsh, Professor, University College Dublin, Vice President for Education, Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), and Director, SDG Academy

 

With a focus on hope and optimism, Anne brings readers on a journey to finding solutions for our planet—together through connections and solidarity. Climate change is now, and climate action can be us all! This is a great addition for every primary teacher's bookshelf! 
Jennifer Williams, Co-founder of Take Action Global and #TeachSDGs, Author Teach Boldly: Using Edtech for Social Good 

Sustainability is still an abstract concept for many people.  The authors help us to connect the dots between climate, nature, global citizenship, and what sustainability means for us as individuals.  If you are not sure where to start, start here. You'll be guided through how you can break down this complex topic making it accessible and exciting for your students.
Patrick Kirwan, secondary science teacher at Ardscoil Na Mara in Tramore,  and founder of Irish Schools Sustainability Network (ISSN)

 

This book serves as an ‘Atlas’ to guide educators and school communities through the complex, intricate, and interconnected global issues which we must urgently prioritise and address.
Fergal McCarthy, Principal, Kinsale Community School and Vice President of the European Federation of Educational Employers.

"A welcome stimulus to thinking things through.  Anne, and the authors she has worked with, make the connections, engage with complexity and highlight challenges from the 17 SDGs.  Yet the book enables us to gain a professionally optimistic understanding of the value of such work to the core task of meeting educational needs.  It highlights the need for a cross-curricular approach, and offers substance to core education challenges relating to hope, respect, empathy, and advocacy." 
Scott Sinclair - Chair Tide~ global learning.  Co-editor Elephant Times Magazine 

“This book provides an important learning framework for young people to better understand and develop critical thinking about the complex and interconnected world we all share. The interactive format and diverse content anchored in the SDGs will strengthen the students “ubuntu” and help prepare them for a rapidly changing and challenging world they will soon help to shape”.  
Bernadette Connolly, Coordinator, Cork Environmental Forum  

Research suggests that teachers, and their students, yearn for learning and teaching as if the world matters, and as if their part in changing the world towards greater justice, greater human rights and human flourishing, greater sustainability, is intimately connected with what goes on in school classrooms and corridors, in school playing fields and lunch-breaks, on the way to and from school, at home and in youth clubs and in the local community. Global Education, which includes education for hope, empathy and engagement, is crucial to the lives of educators and young people and to our current and future survival.

At the same time, research also shows that many educators, while deeply engaged and wanting to teach as if people and planet matter more than points and profit, nevertheless, feel at times underqualified, or underprepared, to teach these issues. And we are, to a certain extent, all unprepared to teach issues that are increasingly complex, depend on increasing volumes of data, with outcomes that are increasingly uncertain, in a world that feels increasingly insecure. 

That’s why this edition, edited by the incomparable Ann Dolan, and with superb contributions by those who know how, couldn’t have come at a better time. This book marries deep and necessary theory with pedagogical practice, and provides a clear and critical approach to key issues that need to be addressed. There is no shirking here – this book is not neutral. Important ethical issues – the eradication of poverty, the obliteration of hunger, the power of new sustainable communities to tell new stories of the end times, the need to sing a song of the movement of resistance to current economic models, the inadequacy of the SDGs themselves – though our best hope, perhaps, for a framework for the next 5 years – and the need to put Human Rights at the core - all these issues, and more, are dealt with in a way that will provide background information, up-to-date analysis, and accessible resources for educators grappling with issues of global justice and sustainability. 

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire once said that those who are not grounded in hope should get out of education. This book, truly grounded in hope, provides an antidote to that feeling of being overwhelmed by all that faces us, and a way forward for those educators who, faced with almost insurmountable global and local challenges, nevertheless, choose daily, in the words of Adrienne Rich, to “cast [their] lot with those who, age after age, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world”.               
Liam Wegimont, Executive Director at Global Education Network Europe (GENE)