Laying the Foundations

In Allyson Guida’s fifth-grade classroom at Lakewood Elementary School in Sunnyvale, California, collaborative learning is a central part of the curriculum.⁶ Students participate in team-building exercises at the beginning of the year and then do frequent group projects. In a project focused on learning about different global regions, groups of three students read an article and create a presentation on it for the rest of the class. The presentations are taped, and afterward the groups view and evaluate their own presentation using a rubric and then decide what they should work on to improve the next time. Such collaborative learning activities emphasize active listening, appreciating alternative perspectives, and conflict resolution, as well as the subject matter. Such practices are part of the social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum and pedagogy that Lakewood and many other schools have adopted.

School systems that adopt an SEL framework systematically cultivate many of the collaborative skills I have described, especially the empathy skills. They also systematically cultivate some of the reflective and decentering-self skills I describe in the humility chapter, as well as the self-restraint skills in the frugality chapter. In earlier grades Lakewood students focus on developing a growth mindset and emotional regulation. In kindergarten, they practice going to the “Chillax Corner” when they are angry or upset, in order to calm down. The corner is a quiet place with stress balls and fidget spinners, where a student can choose to take a brief time-out to process some conflict before returning to classroom activities. The teacher positively reinforces learning from conflicts and mistakes. Students also practice taking “brain breaks” when they are having trouble concentrating, a brief time when everyone can get up, stretch, or jog in place, while answering a few questions about class content before settling back into a lesson.

CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, identifies five broad areas of competence involved in SEL: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.⁷ Each of these clusters of skills can be cultivated in age-appropriate ways across the PreK–12 curriculum. A 2011 meta-analysis of 213 studies on the implementation of SEL indicates that it significantly increases academic achievement and social skills over control groups, while reducing conduct problems and emotional distress.⁸ Broad support is accumulating for wider adoption of SEL practices. In an interim report of the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, one of the commissioners, Tim Shriver, is quoted as saying, “We’ve arrived at a huge moment of leverage, and we need to seize the opportunity we have.”⁹ Nevertheless, despite strong bipartisan support for SEL, some people have tried to politicize its adoption and to reject texts that include SEL.¹⁰ Their reasoning is strained, but such opposition may slow its spread.

Character education is another movement that is often linked to SEL, though it has a different orientation. Character education focuses more on core values and how these can become behavioral habits. SEL focuses more on skills. But these two approaches blend easily when applied in a school, and some organizations lump them together in the services they provide for schools. Both movements build on the tradition of teaching some social skills in elementary schools, but they are more systematic and research-based than prior curricula. Moreover, both advocate for sustaining their approaches as children advance through higher grades.

Character education has a long history in American schools, starting with the Bible-based education found in most American colonies. It has sometimes been understood as a form of moral education in which teachers tell students what they should and should not do, but today’s versions are much less didactic and more focused on helping students think critically about who they might aspire to be. Many charter schools emphasize character development and link it explicitly with flourishing. For example, in the 2010s, the large network of KIPP charter schools made character education central to their mission and based portions of their curriculum on positive psychology’s work on the relationship between character strengths and flourishing.¹¹ They cultivated traits like grit (passion and perseverance), self-control, social intelligence, optimism, and gratitude. Some state education standards are following suit, as we saw in the case of Texas.

The effectiveness of SEL and character education initiatives depends a great deal on how they are implemented.¹² Merely promulgating rules and indoctrinating about norms do not build skillful habits. For the autonomous development of any character traits, students need to have a sense of choice about who they want to be. They need to have the importance of character systematically reinforced, they need to have good role models, and they need lots of opportunities to practice skills, reflect on results, and receive feedback.¹³ In addition, students need to see how the skillful habits they are learning are manifest throughout the school; these habits need to be reflected in the ethos of the place. Hypocrisy erodes even the most sensible lessons. Unfortunately, since most school personnel have excelled within institutions characterized by the dominant cultural norms of society, it is unusual for them to create an ethos that is in tension with those norms.

The social justice movement has had an increasingly large impact on schooling. For decades its emphasis on diversity and inclusion has influenced the collaborative skills taught in schools by emphasizing the skills necessary for genuine inclusion of those of different cultures, races, abilities, and sexual orientation. In the early grades, teachers focus on using culturally sensitive materials and examples, and they often raise issues of fairness. They also highlight the importance of empathizing with diverse peoples in order to collaborate effectively and demonstrate the value of diversity in shared deliberation. Insofar as social justice education helps us to be more aware of the ways in which our cultural biases influence our beliefs, it also enhances humility skills that involve understanding our limitations.

More recently, that movement has stimulated a greater emphasis on developing the systems skills associated with identifying and rectifying structural injustices; much of this work is done in the higher grades, where social studies and history classes lend themselves to discussions of the dynamics of power and the plight of marginalized groups. At this level, students can also hone their skills of assessing the different elements of fairness at play in social arrangements and learn how to use more nuance in negotiating conflicts around fairness. While many systems skills are taught only in college, high school students often learn the skills associated with developing individual agency to bring about social change and the importance of feeling empowered as a change agent. A wide range of leadership skills are tested and internalized in high schools if not before.

Most schools have explicit commitments to promoting diversity and inclusion. An increasing number also have programs that cultivate deeper understanding of the perspectives of marginalized peoples and the skills of assessing cultural bias. Relatively few schools make social justice a curricular theme across the school. One such school, the Capital Preparatory Harlem Charter School (grades six through twelve) uses social justice as a lens through which numerous subjects are taught. All graduates must complete a social justice project that identifies a problem, raises community awareness about it, analyzes data, and tries to address elements of the problem. Such project-based requirements are particularly important for skill building and empowerment.

The sustainability education movement augments the achievements of the above initiatives and has the greatest potential for scaling up cultivation of all four clusters of resilience skillful habits. Like social justice education, it has an emphasis on cultivating systems-thinking skills, and it increases the opportunities for building collaborative and humility skills. In addition, its practices include more emphasis on frugality skills. Sustainability education has been sweeping across schools in the United States, but it is best seen as a global movement. The United Nations recognized that education was fundamental to the goal of advancing sustainability and created the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development, 2005–2014, which had as its fundamental aim “reorientating education toward sustainability.”¹⁴ Global populations needed to learn how to think in new ways in order to develop economically while fostering more just social arrangements without exceeding our planetary boundaries. Various forms of environmental and sustainability education had been developing long before that decade, but the UN succeeded in moving these from the curricular fringe toward the center of education policy in many countries. In US primary and secondary schooling, this encouraged more states to revise educational standards across all grades and shift pedagogical approaches accordingly.

High-quality sustainability education often uses applied project-based bioregional curricula that complement SEL/character-education work on collaborative skills. Teachers often add place-based experiential components to a curriculum to build greater understanding of local system dynamics and to empower students to contribute to their communities. For example, according to the 2019 US Department of Agriculture’s farm-to-school census, more than twelve thousand schools in the US have school gardens that produce food and serve as learning laboratories. The number has grown significantly compared with prior census reports; in 2013 approximately seven thousand schools had edible gardens. Such gardens can be used to teach about the science of plant growth, the impact of climate cycles, soil science, and nutrition, among other subjects. They can also increase students’ connection to nature, their enjoyment of fresh produce, and their social skills as they work together in the garden. Such gardens are easily started, though they need the commitment of multiple teachers, and they must be well integrated into the curriculum for their benefits to be fully realized.¹⁵ Without such support, they often become a single-focus enterprise rather than a multifaceted means of educating about systems thinking.

School-based water-quality monitoring in local streams and lakes can have similar benefits. Project WET has created a wealth of resources and training for K–12 educators to engage students with water issues in their local areas. As students experience problems in one part of a system, they begin to ask questions about other parts of the system, drawing connections and seeking solutions. Some schools use volunteers or trained college interns to aid teachers in offering such experiential programs, which enhances community connections and trust. Increasingly schools also use building renovations and operations to demonstrate sustainable design and management. Their own buildings and grounds become learning laboratories, helping students understand energy flows, cycles of resource utilization and waste, sustainable purchasing, and local flora.¹⁶

The more students learn about the systems on which they depend, the more they want to address the issues that threaten those systems. Developing the skills of reducing waste and consumption follows naturally.¹⁷ Although some of these skills are taught in the classroom, many are acquired through co-curricular activities and peer mentoring. If a school has developed a rich sustainability culture to match its curriculum, then new students quickly learn the kinds of skills required to fit into the culture; but this can also create the risks associated with homogenization and moral superiority/shaming described in the last chapter. If humility skills are taught alongside frugality skills, this risk diminishes. Justified by the complexity of the systems we inhabit and the diverse backgrounds of community members, humility about our own perspectives is reasonable.

As curricula shift to embrace more hands-on sustainability engagement, the role of the teacher must shift as well. The pedagogy of place- and project-based education requires teachers to relinquish some control over students, to adapt to student interests and community goals, and to learn along with students. This can be exhilarating but also exhausting. Schools that make such pedagogy routine have come together to form the Green Schools National Network and similar groups to support the enterprise of transforming K–12 education to meet the needs of a sustainable future. The National Wildlife Federation’s Eco Schools program has over fifty-five hundred registered schools.

What would a deep “green” school look like? And would it cultivate resilience skills? The Common Ground School in New Haven, Connecticut, is one of the oldest environmental charter schools in the United States, and it embodies current best practices. I have known a couple of its graduates, whose stories confirm the school’s excellent reputation for both academic and sustainability excellence. Located within the city limits on the edge of West Rock State Park, the charter high school has twenty acres that include an urban farm, an environmental learning center, and a sustainably designed campus. Its 225 students are selected through a lottery from sixteen towns. Some 78 percent are students of color, and 63 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Its doors opened in 1997 with the aim of serving a whole community, not just high school students. Its mission is to be “a center for learning and leadership, inviting people across ages and identities to connect to their urban environment, build community, grow into their full potential, and contribute to a just and sustainable world.”¹⁸

The curriculum is placed-based and interdisciplinary in structure, though it also includes a solid range of specialized courses in arts, languages, and sciences, as well as standard AP courses. The ninth-grade interdisciplinary math, science, English, and social studies core focuses on the school’s socio-ecological system and the students’ roles within it. The tenth-grade integrated core focuses on the larger city of New Haven, its history, its people, and its ecological impacts. Most courses have an applied, experiential component in which students practice both course-related skills and leadership. The theme of leadership permeates the culture—everyone is understood to be a leader. Each student must develop an electronic portfolio that chronicles leadership growth across four years. By the time students are seniors, they are ready to take on a major project on a social or environmental justice issue in New Haven, having learned about leveraging change in systems throughout their four years.

More than a third of the students each year are employed as part of the school’s green jobs corps, building career skills while strengthening the community. Many work on the school’s farm, in its environmental education programs, or on campus maintenance. The farm is thoroughly integrated into the curriculum and the larger community. It produced over ten thousand pounds of fresh produce in 2021, which supports the dining hall, a large CSA, and a mobile market. Anyone can visit the farm on Saturdays, see the sheep, pigs, and chickens and learn about sustainable agriculture practices. After-school programs both on and off campus serve over one thousand kids a year. Adding in its summer camps, field trips, family programs, and professional development workshops, the school estimates that over eighteen thousand people participate in its programs. The Common Ground School is educating a community, not just high school students. It is scaling up the impact of education.

By teaching skills associated with leadership, sustainability, and justice, the school covers most of the resilience skillful habits we have reviewed. Through learning about the social and ecological dynamics of their location, students acquire solid introductory systems skills that they use to leverage change through their projects. The full range of collaborative skills is cultivated in team projects, service requirements in the community, and the green jobs corps. Humility and frugality skills receive less direct attention, though elements of these skill sets are explicitly cultivated, including reflective skills, decentering-self skills, self-restraint skills, and self-provisioning skills. The school’s strong sense of community creates a culture where resilience skills are actively reinforced. This highly applied education also yields strong academic results, including a 92 percent four-year school completion rate, with 97 percent of seniors accepted to college—both well above the Connecticut average.

The Common Ground School is small and distinctive, but elements of its model are easily replicable at larger schools. Its leaders are helping schools across Connecticut integrate school gardens into their curricula. Despite such strong models for cultivating key resilience skills in PreK–12 schools, many schools are only teaching the most basic versions of these skills or offering an occasional special program that is not integrated into the standard curriculum or the school culture. To use formal schooling to scale up emphasis on the skills that will help us flourish in these times, we need state educational standards to more clearly support their development, and we need more models that effectively integrate such skills development into the teaching of required subject areas.

One promising move in the direction of shifting educational standards is the development of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which include robust treatment of the functioning of the systems on which we depend and the fragility of these systems in our context. The standards specify numerous systems science skills for K–12. For example, one standard says that high school students should be able to “use a computer simulation to model the impact of proposed solutions to a complex real-world problem with numerous criteria and constraints on interactions within and between systems relevant to the problem.”¹⁹ The standards were released in 2013, and by 2022, twenty states had adopted the standards, and twenty-four other states had created similar versions of the standards based on the source for the NGSS, the National Research Council’s Framework for K–12 Science Education.²⁰

Teachers are often constrained by competing demands for their time, evaluations based on test results, and budget issues, so even if they see the value of resilience skills education, they may not pursue it. It can be very difficult to motivate robust resilience education in one’s local schools. School systems would need to free up time and support for teachers to experiment with applied community-focused pedagogies. And they need to build school cultures that reflect the norms that will reinforce resilience skills. These last two requirements depend on having school leaders who support such educational changes. But sometimes all it takes is one visionary and energetic teacher, with some public support, to demonstrate how experiential resilience education can begin to transform children and a region.

It is unlikely that all the resilience skillful habits will be directly addressed in a curriculum, but that is not necessary to leverage the kind of large-scale cultural change that will promote broader flourishing. Collaborative skills are the most likely to be widely taught in PreK–12 settings. Systems-thinking skills are also likely to receive attention because they are cognitive skills and linked to highly salient problems. Those humility skills that are elements of critical thinking—soft conviction and reflective skills—could easily be taught across the curriculum, but here the momentum for change is relatively weak, and countervailing forces are strong, especially our cultural bias in favor of action and conviction. Frugality skills are most likely learned outside the curriculum if at all.

Fortunately, developing stronger systems thinking and collaborative skillful habits is likely to motivate lifelong learning of humility and frugality skills. As we have seen, most collaboration requires humility skills. The more we understand how complex systems function and how they can be altered, the more we see the limitations of our knowledge and the need to decrease our negative impacts on systems, often by altering consumption. It would be better to address these connections within schools, but it may be more realistic to see frugality and humility skills as addressed primarily in postsecondary education.

Higher Education

As we move to higher education, we find different challenges to emphasizing cultivation of resilience skills. Higher education is a pluralistic enterprise. It contains a wide variety of kinds of institutions, such as arts schools, mission-driven liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and research universities. This pluralism makes higher education unwieldy as a vehicle for character cultivation of any sort. Moreover, the increased cost of much higher education has made a focus on career preparation more important to students and parents. Most universities are highly fragmented, with different parts of the curriculum addressing skills that might appear to compete with resilience skills—for example, writing, critical thinking, and quantitative skills, as well as skills associated with competence in a discipline.

In the past, religiously affiliated colleges often did emphasize character education across parts of the curriculum, and a few continue that tradition today. In addition, several university programs focused on character development have been created in recent years, most notably the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Over a decade, the Jubilee Centre has sponsored numerous research projects and policy documents, including Character Education in Universities: A Framework for Flourishing, produced in collaboration with the Oxford Character Project.²¹ This report argues persuasively that cultivating character is a powerful way to rebuild public trust in universities, and it describes how character education might be pursued systematically at the university level. The practices it describes are similar to those used in secondary education, including explicitly exploring the skills involved in desired traits, reflecting on performance of those skills, and developing mentors and norms that reinforce the skills. Such practices could easily be included in programs that have a strong experiential component. The report maintains that character is inevitably cultivated across the university, but mostly it is unintentional, haphazard, and reflects the norms of the larger society. A school cannot avoid influencing character formation, but being intentional and systematic about the process produces better educational results.

Even if there is a strong case for postsecondary character education, faculty and administrators are unlikely to be persuaded to embrace it unless it is combined with a focus on addressing major challenges that society faces. If successfully navigating such challenges involves cultivating key skillful habits, then these skills will be a natural part of the curriculum and co-curriculum. As we have seen, the challenges of developing a more sustainable and just society involve a range of resilience skillful habits, and indeed higher education is increasingly focused on these challenges. Student concern about sustainability and social justice is very high, which is pushing the development of curricula in promising directions.

Anthony Cortese, founder of Second Nature and the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, powerfully articulated the rationale for infusing sustainability throughout higher education curricula:

Higher education institutions bear a profound moral responsibility to increase the awareness, knowledge, skills, and values needed to create a just and sustainable future… . [Higher education] prepares most of the professionals who develop, lead, manage, teach, work in, and influence society’s institutions, including the most basic foundation of K–12 education. Higher education has unique academic freedom and the critical mass and diversity of skills to develop new ideas, to comment on society and its challenges, and to engage in bold experimentation in sustainable living.²²

Second Nature focuses primarily on increasing leadership support for sustainability education, but it helped to create the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) in 2005, which provides training and networking for faculty, staff, and students. Within a decade, AASHE grew its membership to include more than 20 percent of the approximately four thousand degree-granting higher education institutions in the United States. AASHE introduced the Sustainability Tracking and Rating System (STARS) that sets standards for sustainable practices throughout an institution. These standards—the higher education equivalent of LEED building standards—have guided institutional transformation. STARS ratings and sustainability rankings such as Princeton Review’s Guide to 361 Green Colleges and Sierra magazine’s Cool Schools issue have created friendly competition between universities and helped students find schools that are in the sustainability vanguard. According to a 2021 Princeton Review survey of eleven thousand prospective students, 78 percent indicated that “having information about a college’s commitment to the environment would affect their decision to apply to or attend a school.”²³

The sustainability and social justice movements in colleges and universities have taken off in the last two decades. Students deserve a lot of the credit for this, since they have pushed hard for concrete achievements, not just verbal support. Sustainability and social justice have become important themes in a wide range of programs, from business and agriculture to chemistry and community development. Such curricula may not sufficiently emphasize development of resilience skillful habits, but they acknowledge that changing habits of thought, feeling, and behavior are central to addressing sustainability and justice problems.

The resulting cross-disciplinary curricula are forms of character education without the name. Skills of systems thinking are becoming much more widely taught. Collaborative skills are receiving more nuanced treatment, as their demand in many professions grows. Some humility skills, like recognition of potential biases and blind spots, are increasingly taught as part of social justice and critical-thinking curricula, though they may not be broadly reinforced across the curriculum. Most schools do not yet embrace an explicit framework that reinforces resilience skillful habits and connects them to flourishing, but this next step is easy to take. It may be harder to incentivize faculty and staff to role-model these skills.

How could we more fully embody the vision for education that would promote a just and sustainable world that Cortese champions? A few years after I arrived at Green Mountain College in 1996, that was the kind of question I was asking. The college was poised for such change; it already had a mission focused on the environment, which soon evolved to focus on sustainability and justice. There were few road maps then, but our faculty and staff were inspired by the task of living the mission and willing to risk promising experiments that might guide our answers. We pursued a kind of adaptive management within a college setting. I have summarized elements of that odyssey elsewhere.²⁴ Here I will describe three initiatives that cultivated resilience skills—monster courses, sustainability skills courses, and the “Delicate Balance” capstone. These illustrate the kinds of changes we need to make, not what will work in all institutions. For more ideas about sustainability education in general see Mitch Thomashow’s excellent book, The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus, which chronicles the development of answers he championed as president of Unity College.²⁵

Monster courses were team-taught twelve-to-fifteen-credit offerings that immersed students in a set of systems issues in a bioregion. Since they involved most of the students’ time during a semester, they could involve multiday field trips engaging with regional stakeholders and seeing firsthand the impact of issues. For example, in Envisioning a Sustainable and Resilient North Country (2016), seventeen students and four faculty spent sixteen weeks trying to grasp the environmental, social, and economic dynamics affecting lives in Vermont and upstate New York and to crystallize elements of a twenty-five-year plan aimed to move the region toward greater sustainability. In talking to over fifty stakeholders and seeing and hearing their perspectives and stories, students learned how to listen and integrate diverse takes on regional problems and solutions. They learned how to facilitate a planning process and practiced the roles of facilitator and participant while crafting a draft plan that they presented at the Vermont statehouse. With the assistance of Douglas Gayeton at the Lexicon Project, they learned how to create information artworks to communicate sustainability concepts in emotionally compelling human terms. Their twenty-four artworks traveled around the state and to a national conference. And they learned about Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication, using these skills to engage with participants in an emotional conflict over resettling Syrian refugees in Rutland, Vermont, and to develop a website that fairly represented the conflicting views.

No short description of a monster course can capture the closeness of the community that develops throughout the course, the conflicts that need to be navigated, the opportunities for deep mentoring that faculty have. The public nature of the student work and its importance to others in the region motivate students to push themselves beyond normal expectations, often to the point of exhaustion. It also requires a lot more from faculty than an ordinary course, though it is inevitably a tremendous faculty development experience, worth all the effort and angst of teaching while learning alongside the students. These courses seem to have greater long-term impacts on student skills development and on instructors’ interdisciplinary systems knowledge than any other curricular offering I know. The planning and logistics can be time-consuming, but the concrete engagement with issues that matter and with students as whole persons, not just minds in a classroom, more than compensate for most faculty. Such courses provide tremendous opportunities for cultivating a wide range of resilience skills for both students and faculty.

While monster courses emphasized systems, collaborative, and humility skills, one-credit sustainability skills courses cultivated frugality skills in the self-provisioning, repair, reuse category. These courses aimed to provide introductory-level proficiency in a suite of skills, such as solar panel installation, home energy audits, foraging for wild foods, food preservation, bike repair and maintenance, and meditation. The college offered over fifty different skills courses, usually taught by local practitioners. They were wildly popular because students developed hands-on skills that they could use immediately. We had to limit the number of these courses that students could count toward graduation, but we also created a certificate that students could earn by passing six skills courses. Initially I thought of these courses as the sustainability equivalent of the old physical education courses. But eventually I came to see that students’ hunger for concrete nonacademic skills ought to be honored as an integral part of sustainability education. Learning such skills sometimes led to first jobs or summer work. A local solar panel installer taught the course regularly, so he could hire his best students.

The capstone general education course, A Delicate Balance, was taught by multiple faculty every term. I taught it twice a year for five years after I stepped down as provost. It had three main elements. First, students read a memoir and wrote their own reflective essays on who they are, what they had learned in college, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they envision their lives unfolding. In discussing memoirs like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle, students came to see how we can reflectively craft a story of our lives and why that reflective process might be important. A surprising number of students had not thought much about why habitual reflection is valuable. Though many felt they failed to find a “balance” between humility and pride when reflecting on strengths and weaknesses, most were proud of the stories they crafted and shared them with family and friends.

Second, throughout the course, students planned and executed an applied project (often in groups) that enhanced some community, using their skills to make a difference in others’ lives. They read about project management, consulted with stakeholders, developed proposals and budgets that had to be revised and approved, and shifted project goals in light of constraints. Although many chose to organize one-shot events for the campus or town, some created lasting contributions to the college—for example, a stunning outdoor classroom, an ongoing spring break community service project, or an important policy change.

The course’s third element aimed at enhancing empathy and understanding of those who might resist well-meaning efforts to make a community better. It was a sustained discussion of the wedge issues around views of freedom, justice, authority, and diversity that divide many communities and make it difficult to bring people together to create positive change. It emphasized the rationales people had for their differences and encouraged students to confront ways in which their own positions might bias them against others in the community. The theme of balance ran through the course, and we interpreted that theme as applying to how we might navigate some of the tensions between the social norms of different subcultures and bring into harmony competing elements of our characters. The three elements of this course interacted to create at least one place in the curriculum where discussion of character could be linked to specific skills students had learned throughout their education and where they had to think about what flourishing meant to them.

Almost all students were aware that Green Mountain College was a kind of bubble with its own set of social norms that were very different from those of the surrounding culture. Some did not want to leave the close-knit community it created, but others felt stifled by the implicit pressure to conform. Although students appreciated many forms of diversity and inclusion, our surveys revealed that political diversity was not among them. The benefits of strong norms were evident in the way they reinforced the skillful habits we thought important, but the downside of the resulting tendency toward homogenization was disturbing. Some of us worked hard to powerfully present unpopular perspectives. Eventually, though, I concluded that we had failed to cultivate the soft-conviction skills that are a crucial element of humility in our larger cultural context.

Scaling up approaches to higher education that would successfully cultivate resilience skills would require major changes in most schools. Parts of the general education curriculum would need to have an explicit normative core, which is reinforced by the co-curriculum and echoed in many majors. Experiential and project-based education would be much more widespread. Faculty would engage as whole persons with students, rather than primarily as subject matter experts. They would be role models in more than their disciplinary expertise. Faculty culture would become less adversarial, more humble, and more collaborative. Faculty and staff would become comfortable reasoning about which character traits and norms to emphasize in a context. And presidents, provosts, and deans would set a cultural tone through word and deed that reflects the skillful habits students are learning. All of this is compatible with honoring important forms of pluralism on campuses if the kind of binocular vision I have defended is part of the package and humility is emphasized.

Even if an increasing number of schools continue to move in the direction indicated above, the percentage of graduates who acquire nuanced resilience skills will be not be large, and there will be a significant time lag before they become leaders who can influence the direction of other institutions. The speed with which we must shift common behaviors toward greater sustainability and justice requires encouraging adults to strengthen skillful habits outside of formal educational settings. Here we turn to a much broader conception of what education involves.

Building Skills out of School

Much of our learning occurs outside of formal educational contexts. We learn by attending programs, working together to achieve some goal, doing our own research, and talking to our neighbors. We can think of such opportunities as being on a continuum from more- to less-structured educational experiences. The more structured they are, the more the content is controlled and results are predictable. But the more a program is structured to meet explicit learning goals, the less likely it is to reach beyond those who already want the skills it teaches. Since the scaling up we seek requires education to reach beyond those who seek it, the less-structured forms have important value even though they involve less quality control.

As the rate of social and technological change increases, and career changes become more frequent, we need to increase our capacity to learn new skills across our life span.²⁶ A key part of the UN’s Decade for Education for Sustainable Development was a renewed emphasis on lifelong learning and the creation of a host of nonformal sustainability-related learning opportunities. The internet has made the dissemination of such opportunities much easier. We are rapidly approaching the point where we have a wealth of opportunities for learning new skills, and the primary issues we face are lack of time and inclination to make the most of what is available.

On the more-structured end of the nonformal education continuum, we find many short courses aiming to teach resilience topics. For example, we could learn more about systems thinking, effective collaboration, personal resilience skills, the circular economy, or sustainable development by taking a free massive open online course (MOOC).²⁷ In most urban areas, one can also find relevant skills trainings at local community colleges and many other organizations. Where these are applicable to resilience skillful habits, courses will tend to focus on specific skills, not on the global traits supported by such skills.

Such programs can also provide strong theoretical understanding of the foundations of resilience skills, especially those in demand by organizations, but often their impact is short-term and merely intellectual. The deeper learning required for skills development and behavior change tends to be directly proportional to the time and effort required by the learner, the amount of feedback one receives on performance, and the application of learning in a place. Another limitation is that general information provided through courses rarely engages learners in mastering the application of skills in a context—for instance, applying systems thinking to our own communities. These are inevitably first steps toward more experiential learning.

For more place-focused short educational programs, people often look to nonprofit organizations that offer experiential learning in their regions. For example, families may attend programs at nature centers to learn about the local ecosystem. These kinds of programs may teach a few specific skills, but they are at best a gateway to richer skills development. It is much rarer for families to engage with programs about local social or economic systems, in part because fewer of these exist. But we need to learn about adaptive governance, about how to build and repair trust, and how to address social injustice in our communities, as much as we need to learn about our ecosystems. Volunteering for nonprofits to achieve specific community goals is much more likely to cultivate collaborative, systems, and frugality skills.

We often think that less-structured learning is less effective, but one of the most powerful forms of resilience skills education occurs when citizens participate together in community planning processes and local association governance where strong facilitators guide groups through decision-making and model the skills necessary to meet the needs of diverse groups.²⁸ In these contexts, part of what is learned comes from community members who share their perspectives on local system dynamics, on threats to what they value, and on desirable transformations. Usually, expert knowledge needs to inform such processes, but citizens have their own expertise about where they live and what skills have successfully led to beneficial change in the past. Collaborative and humility skills are also fostered through such processes. Robert Putnam has argued that participation in local associations strengthens skills that build social capital.²⁹ Ideally, facilitators set norms, and participants practice listening well, managing conflict, overcoming obstacles, and helping groups move to closure and action. As we saw in chapter 3, decline in participation in local associations has been correlated with decline of interpersonal trust and the skills that support it.

Well-facilitated participatory planning processes have a wide range of benefits linked to community resilience, beyond producing a plan and generating social learning. They can build new relationships and networks that cushion shocks to a community. They also help preserve intangible qualities of a community. Refocusing attention on relationships, beauty, and environmental quality contributes to a shift away from material consumption. They can also strengthen the sense of identity of a community. Indeed, Bryan Norton argues that we can only know what sustainability is in a community after we have entered into collaborative processes to decide what community attributes must be preserved for future generations.³⁰ I have found that these processes have done much to strengthen hope and a sense of shared humanity.

Participatory processes can occur at multiple scales. Some long-term, large-scale processes like the Chesapeake Bay restoration program have had a dramatic impact on a region through their educational efforts; but smaller-scale processes often engage a broader range of participants. The hundreds of small community energy committees in Vermont towns are transforming citizens’ thinking about our energy future. Watershed groups in California and elsewhere have had great success educating a wide range of stakeholders while restoring salmon to rivers like the Klamath.³¹ This kind of collaborative decision-making often generates local learning at its best. Of course, participatory processes can go badly. They can be hijacked by powerful interests, they can be frustratingly slow, and they can result in compromises that few support. Much depends on the quality of facilitation and the skills of participants.

Opportunities at Work and in the Sanctuary

Businesses and religious organizations offer a wide range of nonformal educational opportunities, such as job training and spiritual practices workshops. They also often have strong subcultures that encourage internalization of the skillful habits they value. Both have the potential for building resilience skills.

On average, adults in the United States in 2020 spent 1,767 hours working over the course of the year.³² The organizations where we work often shape who we are. Most work environments have cultures to which we must adapt. Some organizational cultures may be dull and deadening, others toxic, but many engage us and create opportunities for deep growth. Large organizations usually deliberately craft cultures that motivate employees to be highly productive. Although businesses frequently foster competition, conviction, and consumption habits, they usually need effective collaboration within the organization and with multiple stakeholders outside it. They certainly need employees who have a solid understanding of the socio-ecological systems in which their business operate. As a result, many businesses build cultures that emphasize elements of the resilience skillful habits. The sustainability tsunami that is rapidly changing business practices plays a key role in motivating shifts toward cultures that reinforce resilience skills.

Some years ago, I presented my work on resilience skills to a group of Fortune 500 company sustainability officers. They resonated with the importance of the skills but feared that the reality of their corporate cultures would not support such skills development. With a colleague, Matt Mayberry, I honed the argument that a business culture that cultivates resilience skills would give a company an edge as we move through the sustainability transition. We looked for a company that had experimented with creating such a culture and found one in Green Mountain Power (GMP), the largest utility in Vermont. The CEO, Mary Powell, had arrived at a company that was imbued with a very traditional utility culture—very hierarchical, slow, internally competitive, and definitely not frugal. When we interviewed her, we were surprised to learn that she thought all of the resilience skillful habits were critical to the success of her business and that much of what she had accomplished came from deliberate attempts to shift the culture in their direction. These skills did not just make GMP a more sustainable company; they made it a more effective company, with better relations with customers and regulators and more innovative and frugal practices.³³

But how can a workplace shift its cultural norms and employee skills to better align them with the challenges it faces and its organizational goals? Unlike schools, where students can practice and make mistakes, risking only their grades, workers may risk lost promotions or even dismissal for failures, which creates significant anxiety around experimenting outside the received culture.³⁴ Standard business training does little to alleviate such anxiety; it typically involves employees absorbing information and then applying it in a project for their employer. Learning occurs, but the true realization of skills learned takes place afterward in a higher-risk environment.

Some effective business training uses simulations presented online over extended periods in which employees can work collaboratively, testing their understanding of new skills, seeing the results of decisions, and then applying skills in a new context. Creating a low-stakes practice field for trying out new skills speeds skill formation and decreases anxiety about change. The ten-week program Leading the Sustainability Transition (LST) uses a simulation in which teams of participants practice new skills to develop strategies for a multinational bioproducts company to reduce waste, strengthen stakeholder relations, introduce new products, and streamline operations over a twenty-year period. Trainees learn how to leverage change in the systems in which the company operates, build more effective collaborative relations, and achieve frugal solutions; these are crucial to enabling the company to flourish. Mistakes are inevitable and part of the learning process. Some participants are looking for a career change that promises to better connect their values with their jobs, but most are sent by companies that want to green their operations.

Programs like LST can significantly strengthen resilience skills. They are rare, but they illustrate a kind of high-quality nonformal education that could easily be scaled up and that can be offered outside of a business context. Simulations are not the only way to encourage practice over time with feedback; most lessons in music, visual arts, and sports have such structures. Unfortunately, few opportunities exist for continuing lessons in resilience skills, except where these are related to professions. For example, certificate programs that address key collaborative skills like group facilitation, mediation, and conflict resolution are easy to find, though they tend to be designed primarily for professionals.

Historically, religious institutions have played an outsize role in cultivating skillful habits connected to morality. Typically, they emphasize dispositions to act morally rather than skills development, and their methods are hortatory. Text, sermon, and song aim to inspire practices. Such methods do encourage skills development, though, because as believers develop habits, they seek to improve outcomes by refining the skills involved in applying the habits. I may learn first that I ought to be hopeful, but after developing the habit, I begin to adjust my judgment about when hope is warranted and how to communicate hope effectively.

Take, for example, the Christian tradition, which significantly influenced US culture. For many generations the primary source of humility skills was the church. The decentering of the self was prominent in worship and care for community. Hubris was undermined by comparison with God’s knowledge and power and by recognition that achievements required grace. Reflection skills were given weekly practice through sermons and adult Sunday school. Of course, a tradition of hard conviction is associated with many denominations. Often, traditions emphasize some elements of a complex skillful habit while de-emphasizing others. Empathy, hope, and frugality are also elements of standard Christian virtues. Role models for these virtues are described in classic stories, and proverbs criticize those who lack them.

Most religions contain important strands that support each of the resilience skillful habits, since these are strongly connected with traditional moralities. Most also have powerful mechanisms for transmitting their cultural norms and providing advice for those seeking the wisdom such skills enable. They are well positioned to play a significant role in scaling up resilience skills—though in a period of religious decline, many faith groups have chosen not to challenge our dominant skillful habits to avoid losing members.

Independent Learning and Sharing

At the least-structured end of the education continuum, we find that we are both educators and learners. We access information wherever we can find it, whether in books, online, or from friends. We try new ventures and relearn skills our grandparents took for granted. And along the way, we build community by sharing what we know. I was never taught how to grow vegetables, but with much reading and many failures, I have learned enough to preserve a vegetable harvest big enough to carry me through winter. We acquire most of our self-defining skillful habits largely through informal education. The vast majority of education occurs in hyper-local interactions. Each of us has a critical role in the community education process.

The renowned climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe argues that the most important thing each of us can do to address climate change is to talk about it. In our action-oriented culture, this seems counterintuitive; we worry about “all talk, no action” critiques. But Hayhoe wisely notes that to make the changes necessary for climate solutions, we need a social movement, and that talking with others is the first step in movement building. She does not mean we should lecture others about climate facts and solution prescriptions; indeed, the evidence suggests that such lectures rarely produce the change we want.

Her recipe for effective action is easy, humble, and effective. We should listen to others and learn what they love. We then connect the dots between their passions and the negative impacts of climate change. We avoid the hubristic implication that they become more like us, and instead start with who they are. Once we have built the bridge to climate issues, then we can empower our interlocutors by describing solutions that are easy for them to take. In such a conversation, we are educators but not “teachers.” We are fellow travelers, sharing parts of our journey with others with whom we have created an initial bond.

Such conversations take time, and often initially they have limited impact. Hayhoe is not providing a silver bullet for movement building, but her excellent book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, provides many effective strategies for breaking through polarization and engaging the disengaged.³⁵ She also provides invaluable lessons about how to be more effective informal educators, lessons that reinforce our resilience skills. Empathize with where others are, build trust, and foster hope. Be humble, even when expressing our convictions. Use our understanding of systems to show how climate change affects what others care about. And where appropriate share our frugality practices.

With the opportunity to serve as educators comes significant responsibility. The “quality control” in informal conversation can be very low. Part of our task must be to raise the standards for knowledge in our discourse, emphasizing the importance of data, scientific consensus, and careful systems thinking. Unfortunately, half-truths and misinformation shared on social media seem to travel much faster and farther than more sober fare. Furthermore, our conversations must bridge divides and build a shared reservoir of understanding in a community. If we only share with those like us, we may reinforce polarization and unwittingly contribute further to marginalizing others. Communication style, emotional tone, and overall intention matter a great deal. Adults generally do not like to be taught without their consent, and no one likes to be manipulated or looked down upon. This learning and sharing must be multidirectional, with listening being as important as speaking.

I am a teacher by training, and I love the challenge of designing a powerful learning experience for students. But I find the serendipity of the informal education process at least as rewarding. The neighbor who stops by and asks whether I like my solar panels gives me an opportunity to talk about their benefits and the short payback period. I learn from her about her composting system. As each of us shares our passions and practices, we also refine our skills. Our conversations at church suppers or local basketball games can influence people who would never read a book on resilience skills and would reject sustainability as mere liberal politics. The reach of our informal education can be as broad as the formal K–12 system, and its cumulative impact can change culture at greater speed.

The Prospects for Scaling Up

Momentum is building for scaling up cultivation of some resilience skillful habits through education, but we are still far away from social norm change. If you are reading this book, you know that forces of inertia and short-term self-interest remain very powerful. Often movements flag when our attention turns to other issues or when well-intentioned mistakes derail promising strategies. Even if a movement grows, its goals may recede, or it may be co-opted by powerful groups with other aims. Our cultural emphasis on decisive action and short-term publicizable results makes any intentional long-term transformation of cultural norms difficult. We need a mix of concerted effort and good luck to achieve the shift in cultural norms that will reinforce enough acquisition of resilience skills.

Admittedly the tone of our times seems to be pushing us in the wrong direction—toward more competition, more conviction, and more material consumption. But I have to remind myself that mainstream media and social media tend to highlight the shrill fringes of our social fabric. My experience of people from across the political spectrum strongly suggests that a majority would welcome shifts toward norms that reinforce resilience skillful habits. They are influenced by traditions that support frugality, humility, and collaboration and are aware that the challenges we face require the skillful expression of these virtues. They would also support the kind of binocular vision that integrates them with contrasting virtues.

The magnitude of the changes necessary in formal education is great, and the potential for problematic implementation is significant. Just as the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is now a long shot, so is the goal of scaling up cultivation of resilience traits in a short timeframe. But we are not betting on long shots, as if we stood on the sidelines. We are investing in very important goals with the understanding that we do not need total transformation for the effort to be worthwhile. Every small increment of progress makes a difference. Good education for resilience skills turns out to produce high-quality learning in the full range of standard academic subjects. We need not trade off academic quality for resilience excellence. If the case for cultivating resilience skills to promote flourishing is not convincing for some, then the case for its promoting academic quality should fill some of the gap.

Each of us can contribute to the educational transformation. Wherever we are in our life spans, we can pursue our own cultivation of resilience skills, building demand for more learning opportunities and strengthening momentum in the movement. We can talk to our friends and neighbors about what we are doing, as Hayhoe urged. We can model resilience skills with appropriate humility, avoiding the pitfalls of implicit superiority and shaming. We can volunteer in schools, helping teachers to implement the applied project-based education that enables students to practice skills, and we can involve our organizations in such projects. We can actively engage with school boards, and if we have kids in school, we can participate in parent-teacher organizations, supporting educational changes that align with quality character development in schools. And lastly, we can express gratitude to the teachers who helped strengthen the skills we value.