Faculty members can co-create community of practice on UN SDGs

United Nations SDGs

Calling all faculty who infuse the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their classrooms!

Provostial Fellow Cheryl van Daalen-Smith is searching across York’s campuses to identify faculty who have begun to find ways to infuse the UN SDGs into their teaching, courses and classrooms. Whether it’s incorporating SDGs though guest lectures, linking SDGs to disciplinary foci and in-class discussions, providing options to students to consider the SDG of an assignment, or other examples of teaching and learning with a UN SDG focus, van Daalen-Smith wants to hear from any and all faculty members.

The goal of the call-out is to co-create a community of practice, and perhaps organize a teach-in, to highlight what is already happening at York and inspire others to “see the SDGs” in their respective areas.

Many faculty members are finding innovative ways to tether their disciplinary/programmatic/course focus to an SDG, or several – with some selecting their relevance by the 3P model of dividing the SDGs up into people, prosperity or planet. Students are reporting a zeal for the ability to consider real-world issues and to look at them through their own disciplinary lens. Faculty members in departments including dance, engineering, nursing, kinesiology, biology, children’s studies, business, and gender, sexuality and women’s studies are already finding ways to tie their existing foci to the SDGs.

Faculty members interested in participating are invited to contact van Daalen Smith as soon as possible by emailing cvandaal@yorku.ca with the subject line “SDGs in my classroom.”