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		Understanding Sustainability Unit CD 72 page CD   $24.95
		Understanding Sustainability Unit Downloadable PDF 72 page Downloadable PDF   $19.95 Please note: When purchasing this download, you'll be taken through several PayPal pages followed by two download links.
Thanks to funding from The Russell Family Foundation, a version of this unit is available for Washington State teachers free of charge. Contact us to request a copy. Thanks to designated funding from the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, a version of the unit is also available free of charge to classroom educators in Alaska. Contact us to request a copy.

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Product Details

• Why use Understanding Sustainability?
• How to use Understanding Sustainability
• Lessons and Student Readings
  

Why Use Understanding Sustainability ?

The purpose of this unit is to teach important sustainability concepts and their interconnections, including natural resources, human population growth, and resource consumption. Lessons link to relevant and easy-to-implement action projects, including a sustainability audit in which students investigate and make recommendations about their school’s energy, water, trash, and transportation use. Students develop critical thinking and collaboration skills while applying sustainability concepts in their local and global communities.

Issues Covered/Key Concepts:

Student Skills Developed:

• Critical thinking
• Collaboration
• Outreach to school community

How to Use Understanding Sustainability

Understanding Sustainability can be used as a short unit on global issues or as an engaging contextual framework within which core subjects are taught. Understanding Sustainability is often compatible with existing curriculum requirements and topics and extends students’ learning through an interdisciplinary approach to issues.

Understanding Sustainability Lessons and Student Readings

Download the complete table of contents.

• Unit Lessons
• Student Readings

Unit Lessons

Unit 1: Fishing for the Future

Through a fishing simulation, students model several consecutive seasons of a fishery and explore how technology, population growth, and sustainable practices impact fish catch and fisheries management. As the students progress through the fishing seasons, they will likely overfish their oceans and will have to migrate to other oceans to meet their basic needs.

Unit 2: Watch Where You Step

Students identify the components of an Ecological Footprint by creating a web diagram of all the resources they use in their everyday lives and the mark or “footprint” this consumption leaves on the environment. The activity emphasizes the interconnectedness of lifestyle, population, and environmental impacts, and focuses on solutions to reduce Ecological Footprints.

Unit 3: Systems Are Dynamic

Students experience the dynamic, interconnected, and self-organizing nature of systems through an exercise in which they move around an open space trying to keep an equal distance between themselves and 2 other people.

Unit 4: Who You Callin’ Bigfoot?

Students determine ways to increase the sustainability of their lifestyles. Each student changes 1 aspect of his or her daily life for 1 week to reduce his or her Ecological Footprint. Students present their results to the class at the end of the project.

Unit 5: School Sustainability Audit

On Day 1, students perform a sustainability audit of their school in 4 groups (Energy, Water, Waste, and Transportation). On Day 2, each group writes a news article and presents their audit results and recommendations to the class.

Unit 6: Is It Sustainable?

Students define and discuss sustainability and its 3 key components: the economy, the environment, and society. Students brainstorm, analyze, and write about the sustainability of a variety of actions taken by individuals, businesses, and governments, using a Venn diagram to help organize the process.

Unit 7: Toil for Oil

In this oil extraction simulation, students experience the increasing difficulty of extracting a limited, nonrenewable resource over several years. Students consider and discuss renewable energy sources.

Unit 8: Every Drop Counts!

Through a series of water related lessons, including a water trivia game and a short demonstration, students learn how much of the earth’s water is available for human and other species’ needs.

Unit 9: Deep Space 3000

This collaborative activity will help students envision and create a sustainable environment through the design of a “closed system” spaceship that will be in outer space for 3,000 years, and then bring healthy and happy future generations back to Earth.

Student Readings
 

Reading 1: Ecological Footprint

Students learn how each person’s lifestyle and resource consumption choices affect their ecological footprint.

Reading 2: Sustainability

Students learn how the three major components of sustainability (environment, society, and economy) are interconnected.

Reading 3: Energy and Sustainability

Students learn about the differences between renewable and nonrenewable energy sources and their impacts on the environment.

Reading 4: Sustainable Solutions—We Can Do It!

Students learn about the steps that they can take to work toward a locally and globally sustainable future.

State Standards

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Quotes from Understanding Sustainability Users

“I wish more science teachers had these units in their hands. The lessons really allow the students an opportunity to see how this affects them which is sometimes difficult to do as a middle schooler.”

- Middle School math and science teacher, University Place, WA

"The lessons are carefully thought through, are reasonably comprehensive for two weeks, and have nice variety of book, teacher, and student-directed learning as well as a fine balance and range of activities."

- Middle School Science Teacher, Seattle, WA

"This unit was awesome. Thanks so much. I LOVED it and so did the students."

- Middle School Life Science Teacher, Cheney, WA

Supplementary Materials

To complement Understanding Sustainability: Two-Week Unit for Life, Physical, and Earth Sciences, Grades 6-8, this section contains background information and additional resources to help educators and students learn more about global issues and sustainability.

Professional Development

Facing the Future offers the following workshop to help you learn more about Understanding Sustainability: Two-Week Unit for Life, Physical, and Earth Sciences, Grades 6-8:

Understanding Sustainability: 2-Week Unit for Middle School Science

This interactive session walks through Facing the Future’s 2-week unit on sustainability for middle school science. This “plug-in” unit is designed for science teachers who have not previously used Facing the Future curriculum, and/or who are looking for a single cohesive unit to teach about sustainability issues in their science curriculum. Each of the unit's nine lessons is fully planned out and includes key concepts and vocabulary, homework assignments, extension projects, and assessments. Student readings are also included. Participants will gain access to a free download of the unit and feel prepared to integrate it into their science classes right away.

Facing the Future also offers the following professional development opportunities for educators, schools, districts, and state departments of education:

• Educational Workshops, Inservices, and Consulting
  
• Keynote and Plenary Speeches
• Online Professional Development
• Webinars

To learn more about our upcoming workshops, webinars, and conferences, please visit our Workshop Calendar. If you are interested in having Facing the Future present at your next event email Kim or call us at 206-264-1503.