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Leadership for Sustainability Education (LSE) Specialization

(Formerly known as the Leadership, Ecology, Culture, and Learning [LECL] Program)

Welcome

This program is a specialty for those interested in developing leadership skills in sustainability education. LSE serves to prepare learners with the leadership skills and opportunities, through coursework and community-based learning, to take leadership roles in envisioning and designing change and educating for sustainable solutions in our communities.

Sustainability Education

We see sustainability education as: developing the knowledge, perspectives, new ways of thinking, and skills needed to advocate for justice and equity, democratic participation, economic viability, and the regeneration and vitality of communities and ecosystems. We believe this requires a deep ethical understanding of living within the limits of natural systems, as well as personal and communal shifts to ways of being and acting that create healthy and balanced solutions to interconnected problems that face our communities and bioregions. Sustainability education involves shifting to holistic, systemic, connective and ecological ways of thinking and learning.

We believe that sustainability education should be embodied in all of our classes and activities. In LSE, students and instructors take on the roles of both teachers and learners, and we strive to model education that is inclusive, participatory, experiential, thematic, critically questioning, place-based and transformational. 

Theory and Practice

In the Leadership for Sustainability Education Graduate Program, you’ll address real sustainability issues through a theory to practice curriculum that includes ongoing community based learning. You’ll create a network of relationships with your program colleagues and mentors, faculty, and community leaders, and will have the opportunity to apply your learning through a numerous individualized and group projects.  

Be the Change

As a student in the program you will: 

  • Gain a stronger understanding of yourself, including your own ecological identity and sense of place, and enhance your educational and leadership philosophies
  • Cultivate an understanding sustainability issues as interconnected, holistic, and relational, develop stronger systems thinking, and appreciate the importance of multiple perspectives
  • Create strategies for working with diverse groups to create change, understand how power, privilege and justice impact relationships, develop sustainability networks and partnerships
  • Develop a toolkit for enacting sustainable change, including educational tools and leadership skills.

The Educational Leadership and Policy Department (ELP) offers a master of science or master of arts* in education with a specialization in Leadership for Sustainability Education (LSE). Please send initial inquiries about the LSE program to elpadmit@pdx.edu

The program is accepting applications for fall 2013. The deadline to apply is February 15, 2013.

*Master of Arts degree requires proficiency in a foreign language. The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (503-725-3522) administers the language examination, which can be taken any time prior to your final term.