Sustainable Educational Ecologies (SEE)

SEE (Sustainable Educational Ecologies) is a research initiative based at the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University centered around developing, researching and building both theoretical and practical measures related to the concept of educational sustainability. To study sustainability in education requires that we be able to specify what environmental sustainability means, in educational terms; to study education ‘ecologically.’ To ground, support and direct public policy on research, and in particular to contribute methodologically to strategies for building research excellence, there is currently an urgent need to draw together scientific/technical research with related inquiry in the social/sciences and humanities.

Educational research is uniquely well positioned to carry out studies which span traditionally disarticulated disciplinary fields; as an interdisciplinary field, education’s theoretical affordances both require and support the creation of disciplinary bridges across empirical and conceptual inquiry.

This project’s conceptual innovation is in operationalizing “educational sustainability” so as to be both inclusive of, but as well to deepen and to extend the concept of environmental sustainability beyond its familiar referents: resource conservation and environmental education.