Center for Sustainable Development and Social Innovation (The Center) held “Sustainability Workshop – Exploring Tools | Thinking about the Future and Experience Sustainability” on MS Teams on December 12. Dean of the College of Education, Kuo-Hua Chen, Associate Professor W. Jasmine Chen and Assistant Professor Chi-Han Ai of Department of International Tourism Management, and Lecturer of Department of Statistics, Nien-Tzu Chu were invited to discuss the theme of “Exploring Tools” with a focus on the concept of “Thinking about the Future and Experiencing Sustainability” in the spirit of the Literacy-oriented Project of “Action Research”, to promote exchanges among participants.
Chief of Social Practice and Strategy Section of The Center and Professor of Department of Architecture, Rui-Mao Huang first presented his thoughts on “Exploring Sustainability”. First, the 108 Curriculum should be discussed in universities to enable students to have lifelong learning skills, especially the “ability to explore” and have their own perspective on the world. Second, TKU is trying to incorporate the judgement in social technology, economics, the environment, and politics in the courses offered in the group of Futures Studies within the framework of “Exploring Sustainability” for discussion.
Then, the 3 teachers shared their experiences in the course of “Exploring Sustainability”. Chi-Han Ai explained that in her course arrangement, she divides it into 2 parts: macro and micro. In the macro part, she introduces environmental issues related to sustainability, such as air, water, and other environmental problems to students and then asks them to carry out small activities in their daily lives based on the theme of the week to strengthen and accumulate concepts. Nien-Tzu Chu mentioned that at the end of the course, an AI+ Exploring Sustainability result sharing is held, allowing students not to recite names but to understand how businesses and investors think about these issues and introducing useful and convenient tools and systems such as Canva and XMind mind maps to make class discussions more efficient. W. Jasmine Chen shared her experience in exploring how American universities deal with sustainability issues in environmental future courses a few years ago and found that they all use a “teaching method closely related to personal life”, which allows students to try to examine and analyze data themselves, providing them with expectations for the future and ultimately leading to changes and actions in the present.
When Kuo-Hua Chen summarized, he stated that in teaching students to explore the wisdom of sustainability, we should not expect immediate effects, but as long as 1 or 2 students are inspired and apply it to their own professional learning, these results will give us very strong feedback and reap many benefits.
