PHDLOW - Sustainability Education

As the first doctoral program in sustainability education in North America (started in 2005), Prescott College offers a unique model of a cohort-based and collaborative learning environment for its doctoral students. The primary goal of the Ph.D. in Sustainability Education is to help prepare a new generation of culturally sustaining and responsive educators and leaders who possess the necessary knowledge, skills, and dispositions to effectively serve in those roles in their own respective communities. Most uniquely, the program focuses on economic and ecological sustainability as well as social justice achieved through equity pedagogy and praxis. Building on Prescott College's long-standing reputation for experiential, adventure, and ecological education, the Ph.D. program's learning environment is community engaged, collaborative, and participatory. Achieving sustainability in all dimensions relies on an educational paradigm that manifests and supports change toward a sustainable, equitable, and secure society. The Ph.D. program strives to contribute to equitable educational change by building a more just and liberatory future. The Ph.D. in Sustainability Education provides an opportunity for advanced, interdisciplinary, applied and student-centered learning that addresses important global, regional, and local issues. It is based on the social and environmental justice philosophies that have differentiated Prescott College from other educational institutions since the 1960s. This PhD program emphasizes rigorous scholarship, critical thinking, and action-oriented, community-based participatory research. Based on a cohort-model of learning and scholarship, the program fosters open discourse and design of an ecologically sustainable and socially just world, examining systemic minorization and climate injustices, and reimagining whole, integrated, healthy futures. Through respect for diverse perspectives and scholarly collaboration and integrated, applied theory, the Ph.D. program promotes the evolution of ecological understanding, psychological/philosophical consciousness, and equitable learning for a humane and sustainable future. Students gravitate to and leverage this program from myriad scholarly and professional angles. It supports a transdisciplinary group of scholar-practitioners focused on sustainability in their fields, which often manifests professionally into careers in teaching, research, consulting and leadership.