Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years through the platform of a senior level undergraduate course at the University of Guam, a team of professors, researchers, and development practitioners have been striving to refine a pedagogic approach that helps students understand and appreciate the foundational concepts of community development, while also fostering a learning environment and an experiential program that empowers participants to actively engage in social discourses that contribute in positive and transformative ways to their communities. This paper is the culmination of this decade and a half effort and highlights, the philosophical foundations as well as the pedagogic approaches and insights of sustainability education. Employing a curriculum that focuses on both classroom work and international field school experience, students and professors as well as a number of other participants in the field explore such concepts and practices that are proving to be essential to a sound understanding of community development in the modern age. In this paper we explore how an experiential approach that grounds itself on a holistic curriculum that sees the student as an active participant in their own learning, on the power of both ‘doing’ and ‘being’, on the value of stepping out of the classroom to enhance theory, and on the power of cross-cultural exchange to broaden a world-view and deepen an appreciation of the recognition of the oneness and wholeness of the human family.