Human behavior and sustainable development [INSTRUCTOR-LED]

Community Science

Community science is a broad term for community-based approaches to research, often including a range of practices including citizen science, participatory action research, and service-learning. 

Students can be empowered to become community scientists of their own school or community - investigating issues, finding solutions, and evaluating their impact by using scientific methods such as surveys, observations, interviews and focus group discussions as well as literature research and analysis of existing data sources. Through such projects, students deepen their understanding of concepts they have learned in the classroom, see how these concepts are relevant in the real world, learn about scientific methods, and practice a variety of competencies such as cooperation, critical thinking, evaluation and communication competencies. 

Example Community Science and Student Action Projects

• Reenvision Ed: Students interview each other and adults in their lives about what makes a good life, what the role of school is in helping create those lives, how well their school achieves these goals, and their most empowering learning experiences.  They learn to interview, to listen closely, to analyze qualitative data, and to think about how to bring together different perspectives. And, they get to share their work with the world as part of a bigger movement to catalyze empathy and perspective taking - and emerge a new shared national vision for schooling.
• Doughnut Economics City Portraits to analyze their school, city, a particular policy or intervention 
• Example for Doughnut Economics for sustainable school development

Youth participatory action research

Design thinking

Design thinking is an approach that can be useful if you want students to be able to develop innovative solutions to problems in the community (products, services, processes), by taking serious the concerns and needs of the affected stakeholders, and by several cycles of brain storming, prototyping, and testing. 

Design thinking can help students develop a "growth mindset", a sense of self-efficacy, and an attitude of life long learning, because mistakes and failures are explicitly part of the process and considered opportunities to learn and improve. As such, the process of design thinking also contributes to evolutionary thinking, i.e. the appreciation of the role of (more or less random or guided) variation and selection by the context in creating adaptive designs.

Standford D.school is a leader in design thinking. Here is an overview of the steps of the design process (it's not necessarily linear but often cyclical and iterative).