Teaching Social Sustainability: From Adjective to Verb

Teaching and learning requires course coordinators to draw upon a wide range of skills to encourage critical thinking and deep learning. While the delivery of courses in marine environment and management is usually advantaged by the availability of fun teaching tools and case studies, such as boats, and the marine environment itself, delivering courses on social sustainability can seem dry by comparison. Despite the fact that the subject social sustainability inherently involves people and the excitement of politics, it is harder to give students 'real life' experience in this context. This paper, based on action research principles, reflects on the development of curriculum for a course called Developing Social Sustainability, at the Australian Maritime College, Tasmania, Australia. It highlights how the adoption of a critical pedagogical approach helped not only to enliven the notion of sustainability but encouraged a process of learning for rather than about sustainability. © Common Ground, Melissa Nursey-Bray, All Rights Reserved.