Key Takeaways from USask Leaders

At the end of March, SDG Month, the USask Sustainability Faculty Fellows from 2022-24 and 2024-26 met with select former GMCTL Faculty Fellows and strategic leaders to discuss how to affect change across campus, broadly and specifically related to the head, heart, and hand (mindset, values, and skills) needed for sustainability.

Some key takeaways to consider if you are also trying to lead change in teaching and learning:

Collaborative Goal-Setting: Lead from the middle by defining goals collaboratively and seeking to understanding different contexts and beliefs. Involve many internal experts in your unit to grow buy-in towards a common goal. Document and track progress towards the goal and those involved at each stage.

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Addressing Resistance: Recognize collective norms or the ‘pickle juice’ of your team, address underlying reasons for resistance, and maintain a sustainable pace to foster curiosity without causing burnout. Change is hard! We must create space to grieve the loss of old ways and let go of old habits to make room for new ways of knowing and being together.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels

Evidence: Gather evidence from alumni, students, and community partners to challenge assumptions. What are the stories that are told about our programs and what are the stories we want to tell?

Photo by Tavits Photography from USask Flickr

Building Relationships: Build genuine relationships, leverage champions, and prioritize community to navigate institutional complexities and support initiatives. Keep challengers engaging by approaching them with compassion. What is beneath their concerns? What is triggering this response? Seek to understand.

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These practices serve towards change, not just in teaching and learning, nor just for enriching sustainability competencies across the curriculum. We can be what the world needs by working towards resilient mindsets, sustainable values, and regenerative skills for all learners and leaders.

^{Title image credit: Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels}

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The image was shared by the Province of British Columbia via Flickr with a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.