Student-led symposium at national conference – The impact of participating in the SETU Community Education and Development certificate and degree programmes on individual students and the communities they live and work in

This initiative extends for an earlier successful application for SATLE funding to support a CPD session with social care and early childhood education academics to explore the benefits of embedding eco-social justice and Sustainable Development Goals within Early Childhood Education (ECE) and Social Care (SC) programmes and module descriptors. We now want to bring the concept of eco-social justice to disciplines outside ECE and EC where the relevance of eco-social justice might not be as obvious. The Second National Strategy on Education for Sustainable Development identifies building educators’ knowledge of Sustainable Development (SD) and their capacity to educate students at all levels of the education system and in all disciples as a priority. We see this extension project as an initiative to meet that aim. Academics are in a key position to influence the knowledge and values of their students. Consequently, it is imperative that academics are well versed not only in SDG but in the landscape causing and caused by the crises that the Goals aim to address. In this way, academics are better positioned to enhance not only their students’ understanding of the goals but help them develop a sense of justice in relation to the issues addressed with in the SDG framework. We want to bring the international discourse around eco-social justice emerging within social pedagogy to an audience broader than ECE and SC. We think Bowers (2002) three areas of eco-social justice 1) environment, racism, and class discrimination 2) the recovery of non-commodifiable aspects of community 3) responsibility to future generations has relevance to the fields of agriculture, design and law as graduates from these disciplines will be the producers and consumers of goods and services that contribute to or address issues that compound environmental, social, and economic disadvantage. This initiative is unique and exploratory, which will help support SETU’s strategic goal of our graduate’s impacting society with sustainable solutions and position SETU as a civic leader in SD education. We propose to utilise the experience of a national and international expert (Gabriel Eichsteller from ThemPra ) who is at the foreground of eco-social justice as an emerging ethical perspective for civic related professions – early education, social care work, youth work, teaching, social work. The 3-hour workshop will be a valuable space for academics responding to the educational, civic, and economic call to action by incorporate SDG and eco-social justice into their module descriptors and teaching practices. The workshop will offer a new perspective and methodologies for integrating environmental and social justice into SETU’s Sustainable Agriculture, Design, and Law programmes.