Experiential Education and SDGS | SDGs Toolkit

This image shows the backsides of 4 people with their arms around each others standing in a field of brown tall grass. It is a decorative image that represents experiential education

Professor Michael J. Long MES, LLM, and the Toolkit Team have curated content specific to sustainability, the SDGs and Experiential Education. The academic and practical material for instructors and students aims to inspire adventures for impactful learning and experiences. The content includes impressive examples, engaging resources such as case studies and toolkits along with local and global associations and exemplary instructor and student EE champions.

SDGs Experiential Education (EE): is a pedagogical approach that involves “the application of theory to a concrete experience, either within the classroom or within the community, which advances the learning outcomes of a course or program and requires students to reflect upon their learning”.

These concrete experiences are often designed to help students explore, connect with, and navigate the world beyond the classroom, encouraging them to make critical connections between what they’re learning and how these ideas might be applied to various contexts and challenges. When integrating the UN SDGs into your courses, facilitating concrete experiences where students can make meaningful contributions to these goals serves a dual purpose: an opportunity to be agents of positive change while engaging in structured, critical reflections to deepen their learning.

These reflective exercises may help to surface important interconnections between the subject matter of the course and its wider applicability to supporting the SDGs, and meaningful engagement with a variety of community organizations & colleagues can build valuable partnerships where learning is a shared goal and progress toward the SDGs is a shared, reciprocal responsibility.

New Resource!

Interdisciplinary Activities for Teaching Sustainability
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This Interdisciplinary Activities for Teaching Sustainability Guide(pdf) outlines six activities/assignments that instructors can facilitate for learners in higher education that connect to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The focus is on learner-centered and often experiential, place-based activities where students can intentionally engage with sustainable practices, climate action, clean energy, connecting with life on land and water, health and well-being, reducing inequalities, and more. These can be applied in a broad range of courses and displaces.

The layout for each activity includes: