Why Use Sustainability Defined?

Education habits are changing. No longer are complex topics learned only through reading long, lengthy texts or articles. Today's students want to learn from engaging material that fits with their mobile lifestyles.

As our dear friend Dr. Catherine Studemeyer, Associate Director, Exploratory Advising and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina, states:

If you are looking for a way to bolster the content in your classroom and can’t pass on some bad jokes, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Sustainability Defined, our topics range from business to policy and from cities to the natural environment. We do our best to make complex topics digestible for a wide array of audiences, and do so with both humor and engaging interviews with industry-leading experts. 

What Audience is Sustainability Defined Relevant For?

The podcast is applicable for all audiences. We start with a broad, well-researched introduction of each topic before diving in deeper with an expert in the field, lending both breadth and depth to our content. Each episode is complemented by a dedicated page on our website where we share our full show notes and link directly to our sources. This makes the material accessible to students with all types of learning styles and abilities. 

We’ve found Sustainability Defined to resonate particularly well in university settings.  Our podcast episodes are included in the course curriculum at Penn State, University of South Carolina, University of Memphis, and more. Our diverse episodes are applicable to students with a wide variety of concentrations such as:

• Finance

• Marketing

• Policy

• Business

• Sustainability

• And more!

Overall we recommend the podcast for high school audiences (ages 15+) and up. Are you located outside of the US? No bother! Our content is relevant on a global scale; in fact we have listeners in 100+ countries!

How Can I Use Sustainability Defined in the Classroom?

Educators use SD to help prepare students for more substantive class discussions and as launching points for larger assignments, such as research papers or presentations. Our episodes are often used in tandem with other materials including short readings and powerpoint slides, providing students a variety of mediums to learn from. Still, for those that find reading easier than listening, fully cited show notes from every episode can be found on our website, making the content accessible for all learning styles.

But don’t just take it from us! Hear directly from some of our favorite educators below:

For Class Preparation

• “I’ve tried to organize and simplify some of the discussion prompts that I use in tandem with the podcast episodes and Drawdown readings.” - Lucy R. McClain, Ph.D, Assistant Teaching Professor, Penn State University

• ....What I also plan to do is to embed podcast links in my PowerPoint lecture slides and play excerpts of them in the lecture on pertinent points I want to make. We will also play these in some seminar classes." - Prof Christopher M. Dent, Edge Hill University

For Assignments

• “I suspect that some courses require students to listen to podcasts and use them as a basis for class discussion.  I take a different approach.  The course has several assignments that require students to dig deeper on concepts that interest them.  They then submit a report and give a presentation to the class.  The idea is that sustainability is an extremely broad topic and one course can't possibly cover everything...This is where Sustainability Defined comes into play.  I don't assign specific topics to students, but do offer a starting point for ideas and one of those starting points is your podcast.” - Jeff Thieme, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Memphis

• "... I probably intend to create web-links to around a dozen of them. These would be located in the Resources folder I create for each lecture theme on the virtual learning environment software we use called BlackBoard. I advise students to look at all material in these folders, especially when they are researching for their two assignments on the module” - Prof Christopher M. Dent, Edge Hill University

• “This semester my students will have to complete a journaling exercise based on your podcast. I’m likely going to have them compare/contrast sustainability efforts across a few breweries, and also critically assess how a ‘global’ corporation like Budweiser won’t be able to be as sustainable as a brewery like New Belgium.” - Dr. Catherine Studemeyer Associate Director, Exploratory Advising and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina

Supporting Materials: 

For more details on how educators are using Sustainability Defined, check out Episode 40 where Lucy McClain, Ph.D and her students join us to talk about using the podcast in her course. 

Bonus Content: Here's a guide Lucy put together to help other educators use the Sustainability Podcast in the classroom setting.

Need to screen our episodes and decide if they are a fit? Check out the full list of episodes here. Click on any episode to have a listen or view the full episode outline and decide if it’s the right topic for your next class discussion or assignment.

Occasionally there are developments in topics we discuss. In efforts to maintain relevancy and keep track of new developments, we will occasionally publish updates on old episodes. Still, we believe the fundamental research we provide in each episode is age-proof, laying long-term groundwork for deeper understanding of a particular facet of sustainability.