The Leadership for Sustainability Education (LSE) program specialization leads to a master's degree in Educational Leadership and Policy. This program fosters skills in sustainability education and collaborative, emergent leadership. Learn to envision, design, and implement sustainable solutions in a variety of settings including schools, nonprofit organizations, local governments, and businesses.
Sustainability leadership and education encompass ways to facilitate and teach in ways that are inclusive, collaborative, holistic, and critical of injustice and oppression. In LSE we learn how to work effectively and emergently with others to challenge dominant systems to create just and regenerative communities and ecosystems. We believe this requires a shift in our ways of being and knowing, rooted in a deep acknowledgement of our inherent interconnectedness. This also requires a deep, ethical understanding of living within the limits of the earth’s natural systems, as well as personal and communal shifts in behaviors to create healthy and balanced solutions to the interconnected problems that face our bioregions. Sustainability education and leadership involve shifting to holistic, systemic, ecological, relational, and spiritual ways of teaching and leading.
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 transformative.
The LSE program provides opportunities to 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 numerous individual and group projects.
Working closely with a faculty advisor, LSE students develop a program of study that is tailored to their personal and professional goals. Some examples of ways to focus your study include: garden-based education, non-profit leadership, service-learning, entrepreneurial pursuits, sustainability education in higher education, community or governmental organizations, or school- based endeavors.
About LSE Graduate Program
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LSE mission and guiding principles
Mission
LSE prepares graduates for careers as leaders and educators through the study of sustainability leadership and pedagogy that emphasizes interconnectedness, social and ecological justice, relationship-building, and skills for sustainable change.
The following values guide the LSE program: Justice, Interconnectedness, Compassion, Integrity, Community, and Love.
We strive to enact these values by:
- Upholding a strong commitment to inclusion, equity, and social, ecological, and economic justice
- Fostering interbeing and earth-connection
- Developing wise and compassionate leaders
- Empowering collaborative leaders and educators
- Facilitating holistic, participatory, inclusive, and transformative learning
- Integrating embodied and spiritual learning
- Centering indigenous and intuitive knowledge
- Practicing whole systems design
- Facilitating and promoting applied, experiential, and community-based learning
- Integrating theory, research, and practice
- Developing reflective practitioners and critical thinkers with strong communication skills
- Honoring multiple and non-dominant perspectives including multicultural, interdisciplinary, intergenerational, indigenous, and local perspectives
- Fostering critical hope and resiliency through networks and relationships
What’s unique about the Leadership for Sustainability Education program? In LSE you will:
- Be part of the movement to address climate change and systemic injustice
- Engage in community-based learning in every course
- Discover hands-on learning opportunities in leadership, garden-based education, and sustainable food systems at our 3-acre Learning Gardens Laboratory
- Build strong connections with peers in your learning community and cohort
- Connect to an ever growing community of committed alumni
- Explore interconnectedness, social and ecological justice, relationship-building, and skills for sustainable change
- Tailor this flexible academic program to meet your personal and professional goals
What kind of leader do you want to be?
As a student in the program, your learning will focus on the following 4 LSE Key Learning Areas, designed for you to:
- Gain a stronger awareness of yourself, including your own ecological identity and inherent inter-relatedness with the earth; articulate who you are and what is important to you as an educator and leader.
- Cultivate an understanding of sustainability issues as interconnected, holistic, and relational; develop stronger systems thinking; and elevate marginalized and under-heard perspectives
- Create strategies for working with diverse groups to create change; understand how power, privilege and (in)justice impact relationships; develop networks and partnerships
- Develop a toolkit for enacting sustainable change, including skills for whole system design and analysis, participatory facilitation, and collaborative leadership.