My value added:

My ideal positions:

My mission? To create as many sustainability change agents as I can by developing educational opportunities and resources to help teach and foster new talent while helping current practitioners craft and share their story to inspire others.

I can talk to you all day about climate change, circular economy, sustainable urban development, renewable energy, etc., but there are a lot of people out there who make any one of those topic their singular focus.

Me? I use systems thinking to encourage a sense of moxie in knowledge mobilization for sustainability.

There is so much knowledge, but we need to get better with what we do with it.

Moxie:

mox·ie

n. Slang

1.  The ability to face difficulty with spirit and courage.

2. Aggressive energy; initiative: "His prose has moxie, though it rushes and stumbles from a pent-up surge" (Patricia Hampl).

3. Skill; know-how. (Taken from thefreedictionary.com)

Knowledge Mobilization:

To make evidence accessible, understandable and useful for knowledge users, knowledge mobilization is the meaningful use of evidence and expertise to align research, policy, and practice in order to improve outcomes. Knowledge mobilization is not just about disseminating information. It’s not just sharing, publishing, or one-way information flow. It is about engagement, end-user participation, and attention to impact. And evidence doesn’t just mean research. It includes real world practice-based evidence from the expertise of practitioners and what works for them. (adopted from http://www.kmbtoolkit.ca/what-is-kmb)

My story…

Taxis, mountains, and a broken couch.

I grew up a poor kid in a rich town, Simsbury, CT. We could have had a decent home in other areas, but my parents worked long hours as taxi drivers so we could live in a cheaply built condo on a filled in swamp in one of the best public school districts in the country. I slept on a broken couch in the living room while my siblings shared the only other bedroom. By day I dreaded my friends seeing me dropped off anywhere in a taxi cab driven by my mom or dad, and at night I had to lay just right so that damn spring didn’t poke my side.

While I hated living there and feeling judged by my peers, I was afforded an education that took me a while to appreciate, junior year to be exact. I was an offensive lineman in high school, and was usually pegged with all the traditional stereotypes (e.g. meathead) by teachers at first. But after following a girlfriend to a few Gay-Straight Alliance student meetings, along with growing up next to some of the few minority students in town, social justice elements crept into my worldview. I became heavily involved in the Connecticut Youth Forum and helped lead an Anti-Defamation League event on diversity at my vast majority white school. Those teachers then supported me into other civic leadership and got me to speak at graduation. (I was also runner-up for class activist, following a student that really liked tie-dye and hacky-sack, but I digress).

I also worked as a construction laborer the day after I turned 16, working breaks and weekends. While I learned a lot about houses and sites, the injuries and hours involved was definitely not what I wanted to do with my life, so I busted tail in school to get the best grades I could. My mom, who didn’t go to college, and my dad who didn’t finish, we’re on me about that, along with the pressure of keeping up with my peers who, for them, seemed like college was a foregone conclusion. While I looked like everyone, I never felt like I fit in, always feeling some sort of judgement for my socio-economic status. My parents split and it wasn’t until my senior year I finally had a room to call my own. Still, I did okay.

That education though, along with a generous heaping of student loans, got me into a good school, Ithaca College. I struggled to select a major, but I was always upset when students and the school could not figure out recycling or conservation, something my parents constantly reinforced out of morality and sheer cost savings. Growing up, we couldn’t afford big vacations, but my father took me hiking a lot. It was memories of trekking through the White Mountains of New Hampshire and cross-crossing creeks and woods of suburban Connecticut that led me to an Environmental Studies degree.

While I enjoyed studying outside and learning about the natural world, training my brain to think in systems with how things are connected, my education was constantly depressed with problems of climate change, resource misuse, species extinction, pollution, and habitat loss. Very few solutions were regularly offered in the mid-2000s. As I was reaching out to fellow students, administrators and the greater community, I found people were regularly ambivalent to these concerns, and often never heard the word “sustainability,” or least realized it went beyond just environmentalism.

Just about every conversation was a teaching moment, that is if they were receptive and not making jokes at my expense. While I was constantly learning the “what” of sustainability, I realized engagement was my action, and that the tools I was constantly refining were communication, education, and advocacy. Through early writing and broadcast, along with chairing sustainability committees in student government to develop and run campus-wide energy conservation and materials re-use programs, I grew adaptive knowing how to teach and frame sustainability concepts to different audiences.

But as graduation loomed, I was not sure what was next. Some friends had been accepted to Teach for America, a program to teach in school districts serving disenfranchised communities. After scarfing some pizza offered at a TFA info session, I decided to throw my name in, and was accepted to teach middle school science in Glendale, AZ. Maybe it was never feeling properly hydrated in the desert, maybe it was getting absolutely manhandled by seventh graders day-in day-out, but that first year of teaching was tough, toss in doing a Master’s at night. I clung to others for support in trying to create daily lesson plans and assessments that I thought was expected of me, and hopefully helpful to my kids.

After the fog of first year teaching survival lifted, I started to see education differently. Structurally, how I was taught in K-12 and how I was expected to teach was very similar; it was very linear:

But after years of studying the environment and what makes healthy living systems, with all their complex connections and diversity of life, I realized I was having a hard time adjusting to and justifying teaching the way I was expected to teach. I still remember, vividly, the wonderful diversity of my classroom; Latinx, Black, White, Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern. Most middle to lower class, some coming into their own sexuality, different spiritual beliefs or none at all, different mental and physical abilities…and I was expected to cram them all onto the same conveyor-belt as shown above and expect them all to come to the same point. Using dated curriculum that could have been used when I was in middle school, I felt like what and how I was teaching intentionally disregarded all the inherent diverse strengths my students brought in each day, and that I had to either praise or penalize them for how well they “conform to perform.”

By TFA and the district standards, we met our achievement goal, but I was toast. I said goodbye to Arizona, packed up all my stuff and meandered back to Connecticut. But a instructor of mine from ASU remembered a few of my papers where I thought sustainability could possibly teach education something. She called me up saying she was helping launch a new STEM magnet program at a Title-1 school, and one of the program branches was on sustainability, and that I should apply. So, I did and got the job. I repacked the car and meandered on back, slept on a friend’s couch for a few days as I looked for a place and teacher orientation wore on in the Phoenix summer heat.

I had no idea what journey I was starting on, creating what I knew as (and still know to this day) the first comprehensive daily sustainability program for public high school students in the country. Building the plane as we were flying it, I continually had to balance, and sometimes fight, teaching the philosophical ideas of sustainability versus the job training of installing solar panels the district thought my program should be. When talking with a mentor, she advised that what I was doing was unique enough to warrant a dissertation, and lo and behold the only school offering a Ph.D in Sustainability Education, Prescott College, was an hour and a half up the road, and did not require me to be on campus full-time.