EDUC 4223

Community Learning Ecosystems: Place, SDGs & Hope

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

Running shoes are not required, yet we are in training for a marathon. In this course we're enhancing our knowledgebase, toolbox, and collective leadership as we take up a contest unprecedented in human history - inclusive and just sustainability. Part race against the clock, part design challenge and part performance test, Team Humanity needs all of us to be informed, prepared, and in the game. Having teammates to train with nudges us to keep going as we learn with and from partners, communities and action leaders in this grand challenge. We examine five major concepts and explore their mutual generativity as we look for leverage points of system change: just sustainability; lifelong learning; place; learning ecosystems and social competencies for collective leadership and learning.

Distribution Requirements (KCM-AG, SCH-AG)

Exploratory Studies (CU-CEL), (CU-SBY)

Last 4 terms offered (None)

Outcomes REF-FA25

• By the end of this course, students will be able to: Demonstrate the capacity to analyze, evaluate, and posit relationships among key concepts central to the course: 1) Lifelong Learning; 2) Place & Placemaking; 3) Sustainability & Climate Action; 4) Community as Ecosystem of Learning; Learning Cities/Learning Localities; and 5) Collaborative, Social Learning for Sustainability.
• Explicate properties of Learning Places, Learning Communities, and Learning Societies, and to differentiate among them.
• Apply knowledge of effective methods of designing and facilitating nonformal educational programming.
• Ascertain and analyze a variety of policy actors, practitioners, educators, networks, and action arenas relevant to lifelong learning and sustainability.
• Investigate and critically assess initiatives that integrate lifelong learning, placemaking, sustainability and climate action.
• Distinguish different claims and conceptualizations of hope-including actionable, radical, critical, and pragmatic hope-and climate optimism, distinguishing between wishful thinking and cautious climate optimism.

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