Educating for a Sustainable Future

By Lini S. Kadaba

As part of her master’s in higher education studies at Penn GSE, Thammika Songkaeo, GED’14, researched why—or if—faculty get siloed in how they teach about sustainability. Her findings? What gets results in academia may not be what gets solutions in “the real world.”

“The professors said, ‘You only get tenure if you specialize,’” said the Singapore resident of her independent research conducted with Penn GSE Professor and Board of Advisors Chair of Education Matt Hartley.

“That answer made me realize how deep-rooted a lot of the hurdles were,” Songkaeo said. “It gave me that sense of rebellion. If this is the system, whatever I do in the future is going to make sure it cracks down on silos.”

Goal accomplished. Songkaeo is founder and director of the production company Two Glasses, which she started in 2021 to tackle climate change in broad, multidisciplinary ways. At its heart is education—a “critical agent,” as the United Nations noted at last year’s Transforming Education Summit, to sway attitudes, change behaviors, and help the public make more informed decisions.

This September, Changing Room, the short film that Songkaeo co-produced, will debut in Singapore. It examines climate change through the lens of fast fashion—cheaply made clothing intended to be worn only a few times—and its connection to body image from the viewpoint of three dancers. Screenings will include movement therapy, so that audiences can examine their own relationships with their bodies and fashion consumption.

To measure the impact of the film, audience members will receive a “wear counter” to track the clothes they buy and how often they wear them. From dance to psychology, a suite of disciplines has been integrated into this project.

“Everything is connected to the environment,” said Songkaeo, who received funding for the project from the National Geographic Society and Singapore’s Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment. “How we feel about our bodies enables us to buy and buy. We think clothes will become the solution to whatever is the void deep, deep inside us.”

Overconsuming rapidly produced clothing, with production processes and disposal methods that harm the environment, fuels an industry that contributes about eight percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Fashion is one of the world's most polluting industries, according to a 2018 Quantis report.

While these textiles may be trendy on the rack, they’re also quickly adding microplastics to oceans and waste to landfills. In fact, an estimated 66 percent of discarded clothing in the United States ends up in landfills, contributing to greenhouse gases such as methane as it decomposes, according to Boston University’s School of Public Health.

“Changing Room begins to peel away the layers,” Songkaeo said, “and you realize how climate change is enabled by very personal matters, even while industries are most directly responsible.”

She is not alone in applying her Penn GSE education to advance sustainability. Other alumni are working in finance, communications and, of course, schools to fight climate change—a fight that becomes more urgent as earth heads toward a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade. This troubling timeline is according to a recent report by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“To me, sustainability has a natural home at the Graduate School of Education,” said Curtis , CEO of the nonprofit New York City Energy Efficiency Corporation (NYCEEC) and adjunct faculty member teaching clean energy finance at Columbia University and Dartmouth College. That’s because “education,” he continued, quoting Nelson Mandela, “is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.”

NYCEEC provides loans to advance energy efficiency and clean energy projects in disadvantaged communities in the city and region. Working with contractors, building owners, and project developers, it is considered the first local green bank in the country and has made loans to fund sustainable projects since 2011.

Those projects have included the installation of rooftop solar panels at an affordable housing project, energy efficiency measures at homeless shelters and assisted living facilities, and energy storage for low- to moderate-income communities. All help to lower energy costs for residents and building owners— and improve air quality and environmental conditions in the city, Probst said.

According to NYCEEC’s website, projects funded over the last dozen years have eliminated 1.01 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and saved 25.9 million MMBtu of energy—enough energy to power more than 417,000 American households for a year. The bank also has helped green 15,300 affordable housing units and create 4,780 jobs, the website said.

Probst noted that 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in New York City stem from buildings. “Any effort to address climate change within New York City, within the region, has to focus on buildings,” he said. “That’s why we do what we do.”

Probst, who worked on Wall Street for 24 years, said he decided to shift to sustainability out of a sense of urgency over concerns for the environment. In 2014, he joined the Rocky Mountain Institute, a global clean energy think tank, and then NYCEEC in 2018. His executive doctorate in higher education management was an opportunity, Probst said, to dive deep into sustainability and develop skills as a researcher and academic.

In his dissertation, he examined 326 sustainability partnerships between more than 130 universities and local communities. He identified best practices to increase the positive impact of the projects on the environment, support the local community, and enhance university operations, teaching, and research.

“Education is at the heart of all our sustainability efforts,” he said, noting NYCEEC’s webinars on sustainability for community partners and collaborations with NGOs and private sector partners on white papers and research that explore not only successes but also challenges. “We’re educating building owners, educating communities, educating private sector lenders, educating government officials on programs that are working or not.”

In his dissertation, titled “Epistemic Thinking's Role in Collaborating on a Wicked Problem,” Ellis argued that as the world faces increasingly complex (or “wicked,” to use his term) problems, such as climate change, political instability, technology, and rising inequality, the necessity to collaborate on solutions only grows. But, he found, stakeholders often make unconscious assumptions that can inhibit cooperation. Ellis proposed a framework that helps individuals transform their thinking, thereby allowing them to better work together on solutions.

Action is the watchword for these educatorenvironmentalists. For Phillip Ellis, GED’21, GRD’22, a longtime communications professional, that means working as director of campaigns for the Washington, D.C.- based nonprofit Combined Defense Project, which coordinates rapid response and federal advocacy campaigns for environmental groups and allies. Started in 2016, the CDP supports creative solutions to pressing environmental concerns. It brings together grassroots organizers, policy experts, community leaders, and politicians to develop strategies, impact federal policies, and target decision-makers with effective messaging.

Ellis joined CDP in 2017, after working as an organizer for the grassroots environmental organization the Sierra Club and as senior press secretary for the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice, where he was the lead communicator in their representation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s lawsuit over the Dakota Access Pipeline.

During the Trump administration, Ellis said environmentalists like himself watched the rollback and weakening of environmental regulations, protections he and others had fought hard to get in place. “I’ve been doing this work for a long time, over 20 years,” he said, “and the work I had done began to unravel overnight. We were shell-shocked in our community.”

As a result, the CDP began to focus on coordinating national environmental groups and its allies around rapid response efforts, such as organizing campaigns, unifying messaging, and sharing intel, said Ellis. At the same time, he decided to join Penn GSE’s executive doctoral Chief Learning Officer program to hone his skills to better facilitate collaboration among groups addressing environmental issues and other complex problems.

“I began to explore the concept of transformation,” Ellis said of a key theme of the Penn program, which preached that “you can’t have great professional transformation without personal transformation.”

“The more awareness that you can gain over these unconscious identities, what’s called ‘systems of knowing,’ the more conscious control you can exert in how they play out in collaboration to unlock the creativity needed to address wicked problems,” Ellis said. “That’s the transformation part.”

Ellis’ doctoral studies also have expanded his work to campaigns related to voter suppression and threats to democratic institutions and their intersection with environmental causes. He leads one campaign at CDP that supports the John Lewis Voting Rights Act as critical to the environmental community’s goals.

Ellis also is continuing his doctoral research as an inaugural fellow for the Penn GSE/Netter Center Alumni Fellowship in Democratic Civic Engagement, which allows him to develop a community-centered approach to collaboration and research.

“My Penn experience inspired me to learn how to cultivate a network of authentic multicultural, transdisciplinary partnerships and help them to collaborate more effectively,” he said. “We’re helping to grow a community of people to tackle society’s most pressing problems more effectively.”