Some of my Muslim students came to school crying. It was the fall of 2016, and I was teaching music to children in kindergarten through fourth grade. As the presidential campaign intensified, they were frightened by what adults were saying—and by what a Donald Trump presidency might mean for people like them.

They did not need a carefully sequenced lesson about civic life. They needed an adult who would listen without dismissing their fear or pretending to know what would happen next. I could not remove the storm gathering beyond our classroom. I could not promise them what would happen next. I could stay with them, take them seriously, and remain steady enough to respond with care.

Teachers elsewhere reported similar fear, anger, and distress after the 2016 election (Sondel et al., 2018). Research on bullying and school climate is more mixed. One large Virginia study found higher reports of bullying and race- or ethnicity-based teasing in communities that had supported Trump. A California study found less consistent patterns (Huang & Cornell, 2019; Gill & Govier, 2023).

Those studies cannot explain what any one child experienced. But they support a simpler point: schools are not sealed off from public life. What happens in politics, media, families, and communities can enter the classroom too. Nearly a decade later, that morning has left me with a question I still carry:

What do children need from adults when adults themselves are frightened, angry, divided, or unsure what to do?

Part of the answer begins before the lesson—in what adults practice and in the environments we create around young people.

The person in the boat

Thich Nhat Hanh sometimes used the image of people escaping Vietnam by boat. If a storm came and everyone panicked, the whole boat became more dangerous. But if even one person could remain calm and clear, that steadiness could help others find their way through (Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation, n.d.).

The calm person does not stop the storm. They do not pretend the waves are harmless. Their contribution is smaller and harder: they stay present enough to see what is happening, make a judgment, and act.

That kind of steadiness does not mean suppressing emotion. Anger, for example, can tell us that something feels unjust. Research has found that eco-anger can be connected with greater climate engagement, while suppressing negative emotions can sometimes make collective action less likely (Stanley et al., 2021; Solak et al., 2021). The goal, then, is not to become emotionally neutral. It is to create enough space inside ourselves to ask: What is this emotion telling me? What is it asking me to do? And will my first impulse actually help?

For educators and other adults, this suggests a principle I have come to think of as practice before prescription. Before we ask young people to handle uncertainty, can we stay present when we do not know the answer? Before we teach perspective-taking, can we examine what we may be refusing to see? Before we encourage collaboration, can we work across real differences without humiliating one another? Before we praise courage, can we act while our own fear is still in the room?

Practice before prescription does not mean adults must perfect themselves before children can learn. Young people should not have to wait for us to get everything right. It means something simpler: adults should not exempt ourselves from the capacities we ask young people to develop.

What adults make permissible

Children learn from more than what adults say is important. They also notice what adults reward, laugh at, excuse, repeat, punish, and ignore. That raises a difficult question:

What happens when powerful adults normalize humiliation, scapegoating, disregard for evidence, retaliation, contempt, or treating whole groups of people as threats?

Researchers have found that when some adults believed Donald Trump’s views were becoming more socially accepted, they became more willing to express xenophobic attitudes publicly. The studies did not show that people suddenly developed those beliefs. They suggested that expressing them began to feel less socially costly (Bursztyn et al., 2020). Other research has found that inflammatory messages from political leaders can, under some conditions, make expressions of prejudice more acceptable or more likely (Newman et al., 2021).

These studies looked at adults, not children or classrooms. So we should be careful about what they prove. But they show something important about social life: people watch powerful figures for signals about what is acceptable.

Schools have their own smaller versions of that process. Students notice whose fear is taken seriously. They notice what happens when someone disagrees. They notice whether facts matter. They notice whether a person who challenges the group is mocked, punished, ignored, or heard.

Teachers matter inside that environment. Research has linked teachers’ social and emotional skills with stronger classroom relationships and learning conditions, although the relationship is not simple (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Teacher burnout has also been linked with students’ stress, though researchers cannot say from that study exactly which way the influence runs or why (Oberle & Schonert-Reichl, 2016). And in everyday classroom life, adults are constantly making small judgments: What might this child be feeling? What does this situation require? Do I intervene? Listen? Redirect? Give space? Set a boundary? (Kostøl & Mänty, 2024).

This is what I mean by adults first. It does not mean children lack courage or agency. Young people have repeatedly shown that they can organize, protest, lead, and challenge the systems adults have built (O’Brien et al., 2018). My point is about responsibility. Adults usually control more of the rules, resources, authority, and consequences that shape young people’s lives. That gives us a greater responsibility to examine what we are modeling and what our environments make easier—or harder—to do.

What sits between knowing and doing

We already know a great deal about climate change, inequality, public health, democracy, and what children need in order to flourish. The harder problem is that knowing something does not automatically tell us how to respond well.

Complex problems ask more of us. We may need to notice relationships, make sense of incomplete information, weigh competing consequences, listen to people who see things differently, decide what matters, act without certainty, and change course when reality teaches us something new.

Sustainability researchers have been describing these kinds of abilities for years. Their frameworks use terms such as systems thinking, anticipating future consequences, strategy, collaboration, and integrating different kinds of knowledge and judgment (Wiek et al., 2011; Brundiers et al., 2021). Research on educators points in a similar direction. What teachers are able to do depends partly on what they themselves have had opportunities to learn and practice—and partly on whether their schools give them the time, support, authority, and resources to use those abilities (Corres et al., 2020; Timm & Barth, 2021).

A list of valuable skills does not prove that teaching those skills will solve sustainability problems. But it can still give us useful language for asking what complex situations demand of us.

One attempt to do that is the Inner Development Goals, or IDGs. The current framework groups 25 skills into five areas: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting (Inner Development Goals, n.d.). It includes capacities such as self-awareness, empathy, understanding complexity, communication, courage, creativity, and perseverance.

I find the framework useful because it names qualities that are easy to praise but harder to practice. Most people would probably agree that empathy, courage, collaboration, and self-awareness matter. The more interesting questions are: What do those capacities actually look like when a conversation becomes difficult? What happens when two important values conflict? What does courage mean when speaking up has a cost? How do we know when empathy is helping—and when a problem requires rules, resources, or political action instead?

The IDG framework should also be held lightly. Many of the ideas inside it have their own research traditions. But researchers have not established that teaching the complete set of 25 skills will, by itself, produce sustainability, wellbeing, or stronger democracy. One small university course built around an earlier version of the framework was well received by 21 participants, but the researchers themselves described the evidence as early and limited (Engel & Janssen, 2024). Other scholars studying the relationship between inner change and social transformation describe the field as promising but still developing (Wamsler et al., 2021; Ives et al., 2023).

So I think of the IDGs as a map for asking better questions. I would not treat them as a formula.

The danger of turning public problems inward

There is also a serious danger in all of this. Talk about resilience, mindfulness, self-awareness, or personal growth can quietly shift responsibility away from institutions and onto individuals.

A teacher cannot breathe through chronic underfunding. Self-awareness does not repeal a discriminatory law. Empathy does not repair unsafe infrastructure. Courage does not give someone authority they do not have. And asking people to become more resilient can become insulting if the system keeps producing the harm they are being asked to endure.

Education for Sustainable Development has long wrestled with this tension between individual responsibility and larger structural change (Schank & Rieckmann, 2019). Psychology can contribute to climate action too, but it matters how that knowledge is used. Personal insight becomes much more meaningful when it connects with changes in organizations, policies, technologies, resources, and collective action (Nielsen et al., 2021).

Karen O’Brien offers a helpful way to think about this. She describes three connected areas of change. The practical area includes visible actions: technologies, programs, behaviors, and other concrete responses. The political area includes institutions, rules, interests, resources, and power. The personal area includes our beliefs, values, assumptions, and sense of what is possible (O’Brien, 2018).

The point is not that one area causes the other in a neat sequence. The point is that they interact. Self-awareness might help a leader notice their defensiveness before punishing someone who disagrees. Courage might help a group challenge a harmful norm. Perspective-taking might reveal whose experience has been left out of a decision. Systems thinking might help us recognize that an appealing personal action does very little to change the structure producing the problem.

And sometimes better judgment should lead us to conclude that the answer is not more personal growth. The answer may be a policy change. More staff. Different funding. Collective organizing. A redesigned institution. A new rule. A repaired bus route.

The important question is: What kind of change does this situation actually require?

A small field test for adults

Practice before prescription becomes useful when it changes something about what we do. So before your next difficult conversation, classroom decision, meeting, or disagreement, choose one capacity you often ask of other people. Maybe listening. Maybe patience. Maybe courage. Maybe perspective-taking. Maybe intellectual humility. Then try this:

1. Notice your first reaction. What story are you immediately telling yourself? What emotion is present? What do you expect—or fear—will happen?

2. Try one small action differently. Listen before responding. Ask one genuine question. Check the evidence. Consider another explanation. Invite a perspective that has not been heard.

3. Notice what happens next. Did anything change in your thinking, the relationship, or the options available? Do not assume your action caused the change. Just pay attention.

4. Notice what your individual effort cannot change. Is the real barrier a rule, resource problem, power imbalance, workload, policy, or institutional design? What requires other people to act with you?

This is not a scientific experiment. It is a way of becoming more observant about our own participation in a situation. The purpose is not to become flawless. It is to become a little more trustworthy inside conditions none of us controls alone.

Hope deserves the same care. Research suggests that some forms of hope can support engagement, especially when people can imagine believable pathways forward and believe that action matters. But researchers have not established that simply making people feel more hopeful reliably causes more climate action (Ojala, 2017; Geiger et al., 2023).

Hope can become another form of avoidance if it tells us everything will somehow work out. Grounded hope asks more of us. It asks us to look directly at the storm, identify what can still be done, and begin without demanding a guarantee that we will succeed.

The adults children find there

When I return to those children in 2016, I do not imagine that my presence solved what frightened them. It did not alter the election. It did not erase the rhetoric. It did not guarantee their safety. But their fear met an adult who did not turn away.

Children are already living in a complex world shaped by systems and decisions they did not choose. They are already watching how adults respond to uncertainty, conflict, fear, difference, evidence, power, and one another.

We will not model those things perfectly. But we can practice. We can notice when our own fear narrows what we can see. We can become more careful about what we normalize. We can create spaces where disagreement does not require humiliation. We can distinguish problems that ask something of us personally from problems that require us to change the system around us. And we can become more honest about what we know, what we do not know, and what remains possible.

We cannot remove every storm. We can practice meeting one together.

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A note before you go

If any of this resonated—or if you think I am getting something wrong—I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into—something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on—please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing—even at the free level—helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

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If you are in a position to contribute, even at a small level, Patreon is one way to help make that possible. There is absolutely no expectation to do so. Reading, subscribing, sharing, commenting, and simply being part of the conversation already matter enormously to me.

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Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, systems thinking, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, curriculum and professional learning work, and teaching opportunities.

Connect with me on LinkedIn:
linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett

References

Brundiers, K., Barth, M., Cebrián, G., Cohen, M., Diaz, L., Doucette-Remington, S., Dripps, W., Habron, G., Harré, N., Jarchow, M., Losch, K., Michel, J., Mochizuki, Y., Rieckmann, M., Parnell, R., Walker, P., & Zint, M. (2021). Key competencies in sustainability in higher education—toward an agreed-upon reference framework. Sustainability Science, 16(1), 13–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00838-2

Bursztyn, L., Egorov, G., & Fiorin, S. (2020). From extreme to mainstream: The erosion of social norms. American Economic Review, 110(11), 3522–3548. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20171175

Corres, A., Rieckmann, M., Espasa, A., & Ruiz-Mallén, I. (2020). Educator competences in sustainability education: A systematic review of frameworks. Sustainability, 12(23), 9858. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12239858

Engel, S., & Janssen, C. (2024). The Inner Development Goals as an innovative approach to sustainable development: Conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation of an experiential university seminar for holistic sustainability education. In E. Leung (Ed.), Engaging in prosocial behaviour for an inclusive society. IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.1006198

Geiger, N., Dwyer, T., & Swim, J. K. (2023). Hopium or empowering hope? A meta-analysis of hope and climate engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 1139427. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1139427

Gill, M., & Govier, D. (2023). Bias-based bullying in California schools: The impact of the 2016 election cycle. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(15–16), 8946–8968. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605231162650

Huang, F. L., & Cornell, D. G. (2019). School teasing and bullying after the presidential election. Educational Researcher, 48(2), 69–83. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X18820291

Inner Development Goals. (n.d.). Guide. Retrieved August 29, 2026, from https://innerdevelopmentgoals.org/guide/

Ives, C. D., Schäpke, N., Woiwode, C., & Wamsler, C. (2023). IMAGINE sustainability: Integrated inner-outer transformation in research, education and practice. Sustainability Science, 18(6), 2777–2786. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01368-3

Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The prosocial classroom: Teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes. Review of Educational Research, 79(1), 491–525. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308325693

Kostøl, E. M. F., & Mänty, K. (2024). Co-regulating the child’s emotions in the classroom: Teachers’ interpretations of and decision-making in emotional situations. International Journal of Educational Research, 127, 102390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2024.102390

Newman, B., Merolla, J. L., Shah, S., Lemi, D. C., Collingwood, L., & Ramakrishnan, S. K. (2021). The Trump effect: An experimental investigation of the emboldening effect of racially inflammatory elite communication. British Journal of Political Science, 51(3), 1138–1159. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123419000590

Nielsen, K. S., Clayton, S., Stern, P. C., Dietz, T., Capstick, S., & Whitmarsh, L. (2021). How psychology can help limit climate change. American Psychologist, 76(1), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000624

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Sondel, B., Baggett, H. C., & Dunn, A. H. (2018). “For millions of people, this is real trauma”: A pedagogy of political trauma in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Teaching and Teacher Education, 70, 175–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.11.017

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Imagine a school concert that is free and open to every family. The students are prepared. The room is ready. Yet many seats remain empty.

What should the organizers do in the future?

They might send more reminders or advertise earlier. Either step could help. Neither would address a caregiver who is still at work when the concert begins. A family may share one car. The walk from the bus stop may be unsafe in extreme heat. Another family may not be able to read the event information.

The empty seats tell us something happened. They do not tell us why.

Before proposing a solution, we need to understand the situation. We need to hear from people whose experiences may not appear in the available data. Then, if a response seems warranted, we need a reasonable way to try something and learn from what happens.

One useful way to think through that process is the metaphor of head, heart, and hands.

Sipos, Battisti, and Grimm (2008) developed an influential sustainability-learning framework connecting the head, hands, and heart with cognitive, psychomotor, and affective learning. Education for Sustainable Development, or ESD, uses different but related language. UNESCO describes ESD through cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral dimensions of learning (UNESCO, 2017, 2020).

These frameworks are related, but they are not interchangeable. I use the metaphor here as a practical shorthand. In this article, the three lenses are:

• The head (cognitive) lens: What do people need to understand or judge?

• The heart (socio-emotional and relational) lens: Whose experience or perspective needs to enter that judgment?

• The hands (practical and behavioral) lens: What can people responsibly decide, test, or revise?

The parenthetical terms describe how I use each lens in this piece rather than treating the two frameworks as exact equivalents.

I add a fourth question:

What would count as evidence that learning occurred, and what should change next?

Together, these questions offer a simple check for a learning experience—or a difficult decision—when knowing more is necessary but not sufficient.

That is also why the framework is relevant to ESD. The larger educational aim is to help people understand conditions affecting sustainable futures, consider different experiences and values, exercise judgment, and develop the capacity to participate responsibly. The acronym means less here than the educational problem it names.

And that problem is not trivial. In a global survey, teachers generally reported greater confidence with the cognitive dimensions of ESD and global citizenship education than with socio-emotional and behavioral dimensions (UNESCO & Education International, 2021). Knowing how to teach information does not automatically tell us how to design perspective-taking, judgment, participation, or action well.

The four questions can help make those decisions more concrete.

I have lived a version of this concert scenario myself. As a music teacher, I had to make decisions about concert times and days of the week, knowing that no choice worked equally well for every family. An earlier concert might help some people and exclude others. A different night might solve one scheduling problem while creating another. There were real tradeoffs, and rarely a single answer that made them disappear.

That is part of why I find head, heart, and hands useful. I do not see it as a formula that produces the right answer, or as a fix for every complicated problem. I see it as a way of thinking more carefully. It can help us notice a dimension we may have overlooked: something we still need to understand, someone whose experience we have not considered, or something we need to try before assuming we know what will work.

The Head (Cognitive) Lens: What Doesn’t the Spreadsheet Show?

Suppose the concert organizers open an attendance spreadsheet.

It shows how many people came. It may reveal patterns across events or over several years.

What it cannot explain is why a particular parent missed the concert, why some families rarely attend, or which barriers mattered most.

The head (cognitive) lens asks what people need to understand before they can make a sound judgment.

Learners might examine the concert schedule and transportation options. They could look at how the school communicates with families or determine who actually has authority to change the event.

The task is not simply to gather more facts. Learners need to decide which information matters, test their first explanations against evidence, and recognize what the available evidence cannot tell them.

They may also need to examine relationships among conditions. Work hours, transportation, weather, school procedures, and family responsibilities may interact. A change that helps one group may create a problem for another.

The question for the head (cognitive) lens is:

What should people become better able to understand, explain, or judge?

For a teacher, this turns a broad topic into a clearer learning aim. For anyone making a decision, it clarifies what kind of understanding the decision actually requires.

The Heart (Socio-Emotional and Relational) Lens: Why Can Informed People Still Disagree?

Now imagine that two people study the same evidence and reach different conclusions.

One places greater weight on making the concert accessible to more families. Another worries that moving it later would create problems for students or staff.

Both may care about the students.

Their disagreement may reflect different experiences, responsibilities, or ideas about what the concert should provide.

Here, the heart (socio-emotional and relational) lens refers to the relational and socio-emotional work involved in judgment. UNESCO includes capacities such as collaboration, communication, self-reflection, and engagement with values within the socio-emotional dimension of ESD (UNESCO, 2017).

It asks people to examine the values shaping their own response, encounter experiences beyond their own, and remain capable of working across disagreement.

It does not ask whether someone “cares enough.” It does not require a prescribed feeling or conclusion.

In the concert example, organizers might ask families what makes attendance possible or difficult before redesigning the event. Direct input could reveal circumstances that the attendance data never captured.

The question for the heart (socio-emotional and relational) lens is:

Whose experience or perspective needs to enter this decision, and how will we encounter it?

For a learning experience, I would look for evidence of careful listening, perspective-taking, and reflection rather than agreement with a particular position.

The Hands (Practical and Behavioral) Lens: Why Do Sensible Plans Fail in Practice?

Suppose the organizers understand the problem better and have heard from families. They decide to move the concert to a later time.

Then they discover that the bus schedule does not match it. Staff cannot supervise the building later in the evening. The proposed solution removes one barrier and creates another.

This is where the hands (practical and behavioral) lens becomes useful.

Sipos et al. (2008) associated hands with the practical, psychomotor dimension of learning. Here, I use it somewhat more broadly to include the behavioral and participatory dimensions emphasized in ESD.

In this article, the hands (practical and behavioral) lens asks what people need an opportunity to do in order to learn.

That might mean making a decision, trying something at a responsible scale, observing what happens, and revising the response.

Learners could compare two schedules. They might rewrite the event notice and ask families to review it. The school could test one change at the next concert before redesigning the entire program.

The scale is significant. A learner should not be asked to solve a problem beyond their authority. A modest test that can be examined honestly may teach more than a highly visible activity whose effects nobody evaluates.

The question for the hands (practical and behavioral) lens is:

What should people have a meaningful opportunity to decide, test, or revise?

Doing something, however, does not automatically demonstrate learning. That brings us to the fourth question.

The Fourth Question: What Did We Learn?

Head, heart, and hands are most useful when they change one another.

New evidence may challenge the original explanation. Hearing from a family may reveal what the spreadsheet missed. Testing a new concert time may uncover a constraint nobody anticipated.

So after asking what people should understand, whose experience should enter, and what they might responsibly try, ask:

What would count as evidence that learning occurred, and what should change next?

This question keeps activity from becoming the endpoint.

A student completing a project does not prove that the student understands the issue more deeply. Participation does not guarantee that learning will transfer to another setting. A successful intervention does not necessarily explain why it succeeded.

Evidence might instead appear in a revised explanation, a better question, a changed decision, a more defensible justification, or a new problem the learner can now recognize.

The process may also loop back.

What people try may reveal something new to understand. What they learn from another person may alter the options they are willing to consider. Better evidence may change the original question.

That movement among the four questions is the point.

Try the Four-Question Check

Start with one problem, decision, or learning experience already in front of you.

The head (cognitive) lens: What do people need to understand or judge?

The heart (socio-emotional and relational) lens: Whose experience or perspective needs to enter the inquiry?

The hands (practical and behavioral) lens: What can people responsibly decide, test, or revise?

Learning: What would count as evidence that learning occurred, and what should change next?

Although music learning and teaching provide my own professional context, these questions can travel. They could help learners examine food waste or extreme heat. They could sharpen a decision about classroom technology or help colleagues reconsider a workplace procedure.

The topic provides the setting.

The questions help determine what people actually have an opportunity to learn.

What the Check Cannot Decide

Head, heart, and hands is a useful simplification. Human learning does not occur in three separate compartments.

The framework also cannot tell us which issue deserves attention, whether action is appropriate, or whether a learning experience will eventually produce a larger social result.

I would be cautious about using the framework to prescribe emotions, demand agreement, or require activism. A reasonable conclusion after careful inquiry may be that more understanding is needed. Action may be premature. Sometimes no additional action is warranted.

Return once more to the empty seats.

They do not tell us why people were absent. They do not prove that the concert was inaccessible or unfair.

They give us a reason to look more closely.

The head (cognitive) lens asks what we need to understand.

The heart (socio-emotional and relational) lens asks whose experience we need to encounter.

The hands (practical and behavioral) lens asks what we might responsibly try.

And the fourth question asks:

What did we learn, and what should happen next?

Think of one question you are teaching, discussing, or facing now.

Which question might help you notice what you have missed?

If any of this resonated—or if you think I am getting something wrong—I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into—something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on—please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing—even at the free level—helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities—linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett.

References

Sipos, Y., Battisti, B., & Grimm, K. (2008). Achieving transformative sustainability learning: Engaging head, hands and heart. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 9(1), 68–86. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676370810842193

UNESCO. (2017). Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning objectives. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247444

UNESCO. (2020). Education for Sustainable Development: A roadmap. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374802

UNESCO, & Education International. (2021). Teachers have their say: Motivation, skills and opportunities to teach education for sustainable development and global citizenship. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379914

One of the challenges I keep running into with Education for Sustainable Development is that the more carefully I try to understand it, the larger it becomes. Sustainability can bring us into systems thinking, futures, values, culture, ecology, economics, equity, participation, agency, collaboration, uncertainty, and the relationships among all of them. That breadth is part of what makes ESD useful, but it can also make the practical question harder than it needs to be: what does any of this actually mean for the lesson a teacher is teaching tomorrow morning?

Most teachers already have a curriculum. They have standards, objectives, units, assessments, students with different needs, limited time, and plenty of other things competing for attention. Many of the lessons they already teach are also perfectly good lessons. I don’t think the most useful starting point is to assume that all of that needs to be replaced or expanded into a new sustainability curriculum.

I’ve been thinking instead about a smaller design question: What is the smallest change I could make to an existing lesson that would meaningfully deepen what students are able to notice, understand, judge, or do? I’ve started thinking of that as a sustainability retrofit.

The idea is fairly simple. Start with something worth teaching. Keep the disciplinary purpose intact. Then look for one place where a small change might help learners see a relationship, encounter another perspective, think further ahead, weigh a tradeoff, exercise more judgment, or demonstrate their learning more clearly.

Start With What Is Already Worth Teaching

A retrofit begins by asking what the lesson is already for. If students are interpreting primary sources, the historical thinking remains central. If they are analyzing harmony, the music stays at the center. If they are learning proportional reasoning, the mathematics still matters. If they are examining characterization, the literature does not suddenly become a vehicle for delivering a sustainability message.

This may sound obvious, but it addresses a real implementation problem. Research on ESD has found that teachers do not encounter sustainability education in a vacuum. Disciplinary traditions, perceptions of relevance, curricular expectations, preparation, available support, and existing teaching practices all shape what teachers are able and willing to do (Borg et al., 2012; McNaughton, 2012). Those conditions suggest that good integration should take the character of the subject seriously rather than simply place another topic on top of it.

For me, a useful rule is to protect the lesson’s disciplinary center of gravity. Whatever is added should help students understand the original subject more deeply, see it in a wider context, or use its ways of thinking more deliberately. If the sustainability connection takes over the lesson so completely that the original educational purpose becomes difficult to recognize, the retrofit probably needs another look.

Change the Learning, Not Just the Topic

The more interesting possibilities begin when the retrofit changes what students are being asked to do intellectually. A teacher could add climate change to a lesson, for example, but another possibility would be to ask students to trace several interacting causes behind an outcome, identify one consequence elsewhere in the system, and consider whether feedback or delay changes the explanation. The topic may or may not be climate change. The important change is that students are now reasoning about relationships rather than treating the subject as a collection of isolated facts.

The same distinction applies to the Sustainable Development Goals. Putting an SDG label on an activity does not necessarily change the learning. Asking who receives benefits, who carries costs, whose perspective is missing, and who possesses the authority to make a decision does.

That emphasis on capability is well established in the ESD literature. Reviews and competency frameworks describe sustainability learning in terms that include systems thinking, anticipatory thinking, critical reflection, collaboration, values-related reasoning, strategic thinking, and informed action (Corres et al., 2020; Giangrande et al., 2019). ESD therefore gives us reasons to pay attention not only to what students know about sustainability-related issues, but to the kinds of thinking and judgment they can exercise when those issues become complicated.

I have been working with six possible retrofit moves. I would not try to use all of them in one lesson. In most cases, one well-chosen change is probably enough.

Because music learning and teaching are my own particular context—as a music learner and teacher myself—I’ll add a very small music example to each move. I don’t mean these as prescriptions for music teachers, or as suggestions that every music lesson needs a sustainability dimension. They are simply examples of what a retrofit might look like inside the disciplinary world I know best.

Connect the System

The first move is to trace relationships around whatever students are already studying. What does this object, event, text, decision, or practice depend on? What else does it affect? Where do the materials or resources come from? Who makes decisions? Who benefits? Where do costs or consequences appear later or somewhere else?

The goal is to become more precise than saying that everything is connected. A systems-oriented question should help learners identify what is connected, through what mechanism, and with what consequences.

In music, students learning about an instrument might keep the musical objective intact while briefly tracing one part of the system behind it: Where did its materials come from? Who made, sold, repaired, or transported it? What technologies and forms of expertise does playing it depend on? The instrument remains an instrument, but the larger system around it becomes a little more visible.

Widen the View

A second possibility is to add another perspective, scale, discipline, community, knowledge tradition, or position within the system. The purpose is not simply to accumulate viewpoints. A useful additional perspective should change what students are able to see.

Someone situated differently in a system may notice a cost another person does not experience, possess knowledge the original account lacks, interpret the problem differently, or define a good outcome in another way. Asking students to compare those positions can help them understand why complex problems often look different depending on where someone is standing.

In music, a class studying a piece or musical practice might ask how it looks from another position: the performer, composer, listener, culture bearer, producer, community member, or someone whose tradition is being represented. The additional perspective matters when it changes the students’ understanding of the music rather than merely adding another fact about it.

Surface Values and Tradeoffs

Some questions become more educationally interesting once we stop assuming that every desirable outcome can be maximized at the same time. A decision may improve access while increasing cost. A technology may solve one problem while creating another. A policy may benefit one group while shifting burdens elsewhere.

A retrofit can make those tensions visible by asking what each option protects, improves, sacrifices, or redistributes. What are we optimizing for? Which values are in tension? Who receives the benefits, and who bears the risks? Students do not need to become cynical about solutions, but they should become capable of recognizing that responsible judgment sometimes involves choosing among imperfect alternatives.

In music, students might compare ways of expanding access to music technology. Providing every student with the newest equipment could increase creative possibilities while also raising costs, maintenance demands, electronic waste, or inequalities between programs. The question becomes less about finding the obviously “good” choice and more about weighing what different choices make possible.

Extend the Time Horizon

Sustainability questions often look different when the time horizon changes. A decision that appears sensible this year may look different over twenty years. A current condition may be difficult to understand without asking how it developed. Some consequences accumulate slowly enough that they remain almost invisible in the present.

Teachers can retrofit a lesson by asking what has changed over time, what is likely to happen if a pattern continues, which consequences are delayed, or what future a current decision makes more probable. Futures thinking does not require predicting what will happen. It can simply help students become more deliberate about trajectories, possibilities, and consequences that extend beyond the immediate moment.

In music, a class might examine a local musical tradition, ensemble, or community practice and ask what would help it remain meaningful and viable twenty years from now. Students could consider what needs to be preserved, what may need to change, who will carry the knowledge forward, and what present choices are shaping that future.

Give Learners More Agency

Sometimes the most important change concerns who gets to frame the question, gather evidence, compare alternatives, or make a judgment. Learner agency can be modest. Students might formulate one of the inquiry questions, identify missing evidence, propose another explanation, compare several responses, or challenge the way the original problem was framed.

That last possibility is important to me. If students are genuinely practicing judgment, they need some room to arrive at a conclusion the teacher did not script in advance. Agency loses much of its meaning if students are free to participate only so long as they eventually reach the expected answer.

In music, this might be as simple as letting students investigate and recommend how a class should use a limited budget for instruments, software, performances, or recording equipment. They would need to define priorities, gather information, compare options, explain their reasoning, and remain free to recommend something the teacher did not initially expect.

Make the Learning Visible

The final move is deceptively simple: decide what would count as evidence that the retrofit actually improved the learning. Students may have completed an engaging activity, but can they now identify a relationship they previously overlooked? Can they explain a tradeoff? Compare perspectives more carefully? Distinguish direct and indirect consequences? Apply the same way of thinking to another case?

This is one place where I think sustainability education benefits from the same discipline we would expect in any other area of teaching. If we cannot say what learners should understand or be able to do differently afterward, we may have added an interesting activity without adding much learning.

In music, after tracing the wider system behind an instrument or recording technology, I might ask students to apply the same kind of reasoning to a different musical object or practice. If they can independently identify relevant relationships, distinguish stronger from weaker connections, and explain why those relationships matter, I have better evidence that something was learned beyond the original activity.

A Three-Step Retrofit

The six moves can be reduced to something even smaller. I’ve been using three questions: KEEP — CHOOSE — CHECK.

First, KEEP: What does this lesson already do well that I do not want to lose? Name the disciplinary purpose before changing anything.

Then, CHOOSE: Which one move would most meaningfully deepen the learning? Connect the System, Widen the View, Surface Values and Tradeoffs, Extend the Time Horizon, Give Learners Agency, or Make the Learning Visible.

Finally, CHECK: What can students now notice, understand, distinguish, judge, create, or do that they probably could not have done as well before?

That last question matters because the point is not simply to make the lesson look more connected to sustainability. The point is to make the learning better.

What This Might Look Like in an Ordinary Lesson

Imagine a history lesson in which students compare primary-source accounts of industrial development. The existing purpose is already worthwhile: students are interpreting historical evidence and comparing accounts. There is no reason to replace that.

A small retrofit might use Widen the View. The teacher adds one carefully chosen source from someone occupying a substantially different position within the same historical system: perhaps a worker, business owner, nearby resident, policymaker, displaced community, or another affected group appropriate to the case.

The questions might remain very close to historical inquiry. What becomes visible from this position that was difficult to see in the other accounts? Where do the sources agree? Where do they conflict? What does each person have reason to notice? What might each person have difficulty seeing?

The class is still doing history. At the same time, students are becoming more capable of recognizing that position within a system can shape what people experience, know, value, and perceive as possible.

The same approach can travel across subjects. A mathematics teacher might keep the quantitative objective while asking which interacting variables could plausibly explain the pattern students calculated. A literature teacher could preserve close reading while asking what future a character’s or institution’s decisions are helping create. A science teacher could keep the scientific analysis while asking students to compare the benefits, risks, and tradeoffs among possible responses. A music teacher could maintain a musical objective while tracing one material, technological, cultural, economic, ecological, or labor relationship behind an instrument, recording, performance, or musical practice.

None of these requires turning the lesson into a sustainability unit. The change is smaller: one part of the learning has been widened, deepened, or made more explicit.

Leave Enough Room for a Real Answer

There is one additional test I would add. A sustainability purpose should not quietly turn an inquiry into an assignment where the conclusion has already been decided.

Suppose students are investigating disposable water bottles at school. One assignment might ask them to research the environmental harms of disposable bottles and develop a campaign to eliminate them. Students could certainly learn something from that project, but most of the judgment has already happened before the investigation begins.

A more open inquiry might ask students to investigate plastic waste alongside drinking-fountain availability, extreme heat, disability access, emergency preparedness, cost, visitor needs, procurement rules, fundraising, unequal access to reusable bottles, and who actually has the authority to change the system. The situation quickly becomes more complicated.

Students might recommend eliminating some disposable bottles. They might decide they are still necessary in particular circumstances. They might recommend improving water infrastructure instead. They might discover that the original question needs to be reframed.

That complication is useful. Competency-oriented approaches to ESD emphasize critical thinking, systems thinking, evaluation, collaboration, and strategic reasoning rather than simply reproducing a preferred conclusion (Corres et al., 2020; Giangrande et al., 2019). If we want learners to develop those capacities, they need genuine opportunities to use them.

How Small Can a Meaningful Change Be?

I keep returning to the word small because educational improvement so often arrives as accumulation. Teachers are asked to incorporate another initiative, framework, responsibility, standard, or priority into work that was already full.

Research on ESD implementation gives us good reason to take those conditions seriously. Teachers’ confidence, preparation, disciplinary context, institutional support, and opportunities for sustained professional learning all influence practice (Boeve-de Pauw et al., 2022; Borg et al., 2012; McNaughton, 2012). Feasibility therefore belongs inside the design problem.

A useful sustainability retrofit should be substantial enough to improve the learning while remaining realistic enough to use. Sometimes that may involve redesigning a unit. Sometimes it may involve changing one question.

Before finishing, I would try one last test: Could I explain why this change belongs in the lesson without saying “because sustainability is important”?

Perhaps students cannot understand the industry without examining its material and labor relationships. Perhaps they cannot evaluate the decision responsibly without considering who receives the benefits and who bears the risks. Perhaps they cannot understand the historical development from only one position within the system. Those are educational reasons for making the change.

ESD can become very large very quickly. The classroom, however, is still built through particular questions, tasks, conversations, choices, and lessons. We do not always need to begin by rebuilding the curriculum. A useful starting point may be much smaller: preserve what is already worth teaching, choose one place where the learning could become more capable, and then look carefully at whether the change actually helped.

Sometimes a lesson does not need more content. It needs a better question.

If any of this resonated—or if you think I am getting something wrong—I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into—something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on—please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing—even at the free level—helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities—linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett.

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References

Boeve-de Pauw, J., Olsson, D., Berglund, T., & Gericke, N. (2022). Teachers’ ESD self-efficacy and practices: A longitudinal study on the impact of teacher professional development. Environmental Education Research, 28(6), 867–885. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2022.2042206

Borg, C., Gericke, N., Höglund, H.-O., & Bergman, E. (2012). The barriers encountered by teachers implementing education for sustainable development: Discipline bound differences and teaching traditions. Research in Science & Technological Education, 30, 185–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/02635143.2012.699891

Corres, A., Rieckmann, M., Espasa, A., & Ruiz-Mallén, I. (2020). Educator competences in sustainability education: A systematic review of frameworks. Sustainability, 12(23), 9858. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12239858

Giangrande, N., White, R. M., East, M., Jackson, R., Clarke, T., Saloff Coste, M., & Penha-Lopes, G. (2019). A competency framework to assess and activate Education for Sustainable Development: Addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals 4.7 challenge. Sustainability, 11(10), 2832. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11102832

McNaughton, M. J. (2012). Implementing Education for Sustainable Development in schools: Learning from teachers’ reflections. Environmental Education Research, 18(6), 765–782. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2012.665850

Those questions point to a problem that is easy to miss. Many people may not need another argument that sustainability matters. They need help moving from concern to capability. I use the term concern-to-capacity gap to describe the space between recognizing that an issue matters and having the knowledge, confidence, judgment, tools, and opportunities to respond well.

The gap is especially visible in education, but it is not confined to teachers. Anyone can care about climate change, biodiversity, inequality, community wellbeing, or the future and still wonder where to begin. Capacity can be developed, but it is not the endpoint. A second gap can appear between having the ability to respond and actually putting that ability into practice. I think of this as a capacity-to-action gap, one that begins to close through practice, feedback, reflection, and repeated opportunities to participate.

Concern About Climate Change Is Already Widespread

We may be starting with more concern than we realize, which means raising awareness cannot be the whole strategy.

In spring 2026, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,068 U.S. adults. Sixty-six percent said they were at least somewhat worried about global warming, while 65 percent said the issue was at least somewhat important to them personally. Yet 69 percent said they rarely or never discuss global warming with family and friends (Leiserowitz et al., 2026).

Concern, in other words, can be widespread without being highly visible. There is also substantial support for education as part of the response. In fall 2025, 73 percent of registered voters agreed that schools should teach children about the causes and consequences of global warming and potential solutions (Leiserowitz et al., 2025).

These findings do not show that most Americans embrace Education for Sustainable Development, or ESD, agree about climate policy, or share one understanding of sustainability. Climate change is only one part of a wider field involving ecological, social, economic, cultural, institutional, and ethical questions. What the surveys establish is narrower but still useful: climate concern is already common. Once we recognize that starting point, a better question comes into view. If concern exists, why does it not automatically become informed action?

Concern Does Not Automatically Become Action

Awareness, caring, and activity are different dimensions, and people can occupy many combinations of them.

Stephen Sterling (2026) recently shared a simple thought model built around those three variables: whether people are aware of climate, nature, and related crises; whether they care beyond their immediate personal interests; and whether they are active in intentional change. He describes caring as an affective “system of concern” (Sterling, 2026, para. 3) and explicitly notes that the model simplifies a much more complicated reality. Its value lies partly in reminding us that people do not all begin in the same place and may therefore need different educational strategies.

Sterling is one of the sustainability education thinkers I return to most often, particularly for systems thinking and educational change. I appreciate how clearly he can expose the structure of a complicated problem without pretending that the problem itself is simple. His three variables create eight possible combinations.

The examples that follow are my own illustrations of the eight positions generated by Sterling’s model, not descriptions supplied by Sterling.

Someone who is not aware, not caring, and not active may simply be disengaged. Someone who is aware but neither caring nor active may understand the evidence while seeing little reason for personal involvement. Someone who is caring but neither aware nor active may care deeply about children, animals, fairness, or community but lack a wider map connecting those concerns to sustainability.

A person who is aware and caring but not active may understand a problem and care strongly while feeling overwhelmed, powerless, or unsure where to begin. This may be the clearest example of the concern-to-capacity gap. Someone who is active but neither aware nor caring might follow a workplace recycling policy because it is required, while someone who is aware and active but not especially caring might reduce energy use because doing so saves money or helps an organization meet a target.

A person who is caring and active but not very aware might volunteer at a food bank, restore habitat, or organize neighbors during extreme heat without yet understanding the wider systems surrounding the issue. Finally, someone who is aware, caring, and active brings understanding, concern, and intentional practice together while remaining open to learning and revision.

These positions are not permanent personality types. The same person may occupy different positions on climate change, poverty, biodiversity, or another issue. Their educational value is diagnostic. Someone who lacks understanding may need knowledge. Someone who cares but lacks a wider map may need systems understanding. Someone who understands and cares but feels stuck may need examples, practice, community, confidence, or a realistic place to begin. More information will not address every gap.

Knowing ESD Is Different From Caring About Its Issues

Low familiarity with ESD or the Sustainable Development Goals should not be mistaken for indifference toward the problems they address.

In my dissertation, I examined perspectives related to ESD and the SDGs among K–12 music educators in the Southwestern United States (Bartlett, 2025). Among the 57 respondents who answered a question about SDG familiarity, 24.6 percent reported being not at all familiar with the goals and 26.3 percent were only slightly familiar. Together, 50.9 percent fell into those two categories.

Those results establish limited SDG familiarity within that part of my sample. They do not establish that those educators were unconcerned about climate change, poverty, equity, democracy, biodiversity, cultural continuity, community wellbeing, or students’ futures.

A teacher can care about those questions without knowing the acronym ESD. Educators may encounter related concerns through climate literacy, environmental education, civic learning, global competence, human-rights education, place-based education, or other traditions. Some may already be engaging related questions. A class investigating neighborhood heat, examining inequality through literature, maintaining a community garden, or exploring cultural continuity may be encountering sustainability without naming the work ESD.

Recognition therefore comes before prescription. If we mistake unfamiliarity for indifference, we are likely to offer educators the wrong kind of support. Helping teachers recognize relevant relationships already present in their subjects, schools, and communities gives them a better basis for deciding whether those relationships deserve further investigation and what capacities they might need next.

The Practical Barrier Is Often Capacity

Goodwill alone is not enough to enact ESD responsibly. Educators also need conceptual understanding, pedagogical tools, opportunities to practice, and room for contextual judgment. UNESCO makes “building capacities of educators” one of the five Priority Action Areas of its ESD for 2030 framework and calls for educators to have opportunities to develop the capacities needed to foster learning for sustainable development (UNESCO, 2020).

In practice, that capacity involves answering ordinary professional questions. What is genuinely relevant to this subject and these students? Which relationships are worth investigating? What evidence is needed? How should uncertainty and disagreement be handled? What can students reasonably investigate, design, decide, or influence? When is a sustainability connection useful, and when would it be forced or lower priority?

These questions help distinguish thoughtful ESD from simply attaching a sustainability label to existing instruction. ESD need not mean making every lesson about sustainability or steering students toward predetermined conclusions. A responsible teacher may examine a possible connection and decide to develop it, adapt it, postpone it, or leave it alone. Professional capacity includes making that judgment well.

Teacher education has an important role here. Future and practicing educators need opportunities to see examples, develop foundational ESD literacy, practice systems thinking, design learning experiences, receive feedback, protect student judgment, and examine what students actually learn.

Developing capability, however, raises the next practical question: how does capacity become action? Knowing how to map a system, design an inquiry, or facilitate a difficult discussion is different from using those abilities in an authentic setting. The capacity-to-action gap begins to narrow through practice. A teacher might test one redesigned lesson and examine what students noticed or understood. A teacher educator might incorporate one ESD design exercise into a methods course and revise it after seeing how candidates respond. Someone outside education might investigate one local system, join an existing community effort, or try one informed change and examine what follows. Capacity becomes more usable through experience, feedback, reflection, and revision.

ESD Can Make the Next Step Easier to See

ESD becomes especially useful when it helps people notice consequential relationships, investigate them carefully, and identify proportionate next steps.

Systems thinking directs attention toward relationships, causes, consequences, feedback, power, and interdependence. Futures thinking creates space to ask what may happen next and what alternatives are possible. Participatory learning invites people to investigate, deliberate, create, decide, and contribute rather than remain passive recipients of information (UNESCO, 2020). Sterling similarly distinguishes reactive or “default” learning from anticipative learning: learning that is proactive, reflexive, critically self-aware, and directed toward informed action (Sterling, n.d.).

For a teacher, a first experiment can be modest. Take one lesson you already teach and ask what consequential relationship students might notice more clearly. Then ask what question could help them investigate that relationship and what they might reasonably do with what they learn. They could compare alternatives, map a system, examine evidence, create something, deliberate a decision, or investigate a local condition.

That exercise does not prove that students will change their behavior or transform a wider system. It creates an opportunity to see more clearly, ask better questions, reason with greater care, and practice informed judgment. If the teacher then examines what happened and adjusts the next attempt, the experience becomes part of building professional capacity rather than a one-time sustainability activity.

The same invitation extends beyond classrooms. You do not have to teach sustainability to participate in it, and you do not need to become an expert before beginning. Anyone can choose one system that touches everyday life, learn more about how it works, notice who makes decisions, examine who receives benefits and bears costs, find people already working on the issue, and decide whether there is a meaningful role to play.

This is what excites me about ESD. Sustainability can become less like an impossible list of crises and more like a disciplined way of seeing, learning, judging, imagining, and participating. For educators especially, my work is increasingly about making those pathways easier to see: translating complex frameworks, identifying legitimate curricular entry points, developing practical tools, and helping teachers build capacity without assigning them responsibility beyond their power.

The concern-to-capacity gap is encouraging in one important respect: capacity grows through use. None of us has to understand every system or solve every problem before beginning. We can learn to see one relationship more clearly, investigate it with greater care, decide what a responsible next step might be, try it where appropriate, and revise in response to what we learn.

That leaves a question worth carrying into a classroom, a teacher-education course, a workplace, or ordinary life: What relationship can I see more clearly now, and what would be a responsible next step from where I actually am?

If any of this resonated—or if you think I am getting something wrong—I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into—something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on—please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing—even at the free level—helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities—linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett.

Share Teaching for a Complex World

References

Bartlett, K. C. (2025). Education for Sustainable Development in K–12 Music Education: A Survey Study of Teacher Perspectives and Practices in the Southwestern United States [ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3281118753?pq-origsite=primo&accountid=4485

Leiserowitz, A., Kotcher, J., Rosenthal, S., Goddard, E., Carman, J., Verner, M., Myers, T., Ettinger, J., Fine, J., Richards, E., Goldberg, M., Marlon, J., & Maibach, E. (2025). Climate change in the American mind: Politics & policy, Fall 2025. Yale University and George Mason University. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-politics-policy-fall-2025/

Leiserowitz, A., Kotcher, J., Rosenthal, S., Goddard, E., Carman, J., Verner, M., Myers, T., Ettinger, J., Fine, J., Richards, E., Goldberg, M., Marlon, J., & Maibach, E. (2026). Climate change in the American mind: Beliefs & attitudes, Spring 2026. Yale University and George Mason University. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-beliefs-attitudes-spring-2026/

Sterling, S. (n.d.). Key ideas: “Bite-sized Sterling.” Retrieved August 10, 2026, from https://sustainableeducation.co.uk/key-ideas/

Sterling, S. (2026, August 6). Worse world – Better world Some five years ago, I considered a simple thought model based on three variables: i) how [Post]. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephen-sterling-sused_worse-world-better-world-some-five-years-activity-7491083903991054336-fiUJ/

UNESCO. (2020). Education for sustainable development: A roadmap. https://doi.org/10.54675/YFRE1448

A brief note of thanks

Before beginning, I want to pause and thank everyone who reads, subscribes—whether freely or as a paid supporter—leaves a comment, shares an article, or takes the time to tell me what a piece made them think about.

Teaching for a Complex World recently crossed 80 subscribers. I do not always know whether the questions I am exploring will resonate beyond my own desk, so every person who chooses to follow along means more to me than I can easily express. Your attention, encouragement, questions, and ideas help make this feel like a genuine conversation rather than words sent into the distance. I am deeply grateful that you are here.

A teacher opens a district document and finds a crowded vocabulary: climate literacy, environmental education, global competence, civic learning, green schools, place-based education, sustainability, perhaps even Education for Sustainable Development. A parent encounters several of the same phrases on a school-board agenda. A voter sees them in a candidate statement, a facilities proposal, a bond measure, or a debate over state standards.

What, exactly, do these terms mean? Are they different names for the same educational project? Do they represent separate fields, competing priorities, teaching methods, or pieces of a larger mission? Does climate education belong mainly to science? Is civic learning part of sustainability? What makes a school “green”? Where does Education for Sustainable Development—usually shortened to ESD—fit among all of them?

Even as someone who studies this territory, I sometimes have to stop and sort the language. The terms overlap, but never perfectly. Some describe established professional fields. Others identify particular competencies, teaching approaches, policy priorities, or whole-school initiatives. Each carries its own history, institutions, public associations, and preferred questions. Their relationships are rarely made visible in one place.

The need for clarity becomes especially relevant during a midterm-election year. Depending on where readers live, related ideas may appear in school-board races, candidate platforms, curriculum debates, state proposals, facilities plans, or local ballot initiatives. The terminology can shape how a proposal is understood before anyone has examined what it would actually ask schools, teachers, or students to do.

My purpose here is professional and educational clarity. I am not advising anyone how to vote. I want to offer a map that helps teachers, teacher educators, parents, voters, and other members of the public recognize the language they may encounter and ask more informed questions about it.

Which traditions focus primarily on environment, climate, place, citizenship, rights, peace, or global interdependence? Which terms describe ways of teaching rather than educational purposes? Where do the traditions meet, and where do their differences matter? Why do I organize much of my own work through ESD when it is neither the only available framework nor automatically the best choice for every educational question?

This article is my attempt to make that landscape easier to read. My hope is that the next time one of these terms appears in a school document, professional conversation, public proposal, or ballot discussion, it will feel less like an isolated slogan and more like a recognizable point on a larger educational map.

A larger educational mission

In November 2023, UNESCO’s 194 Member States adopted the Recommendation on Education for Peace and Human Rights, International Understanding, Cooperation, Fundamental Freedoms, Global Citizenship and Sustainable Development. The shorter title, the Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development, conveys its broad ambition: education should help people develop the knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and behaviors needed to live together with dignity, participate in society, address contemporary challenges, and contribute to peaceful, just, inclusive, and sustainable futures (UNESCO, 2023).

The Recommendation gathers concerns that often appear separately in American education. Peace, human rights, democratic participation, global interdependence, cultural understanding, equality, climate change, and sustainable development belong to a connected educational mission. Its scope extends across policy, curriculum, teaching, assessment, learning environments, educator development, and learning throughout life (UNESCO, 2023).

ESD occupies a major place within this wider mission. UNESCO describes ESD as education that equips people with knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and capacities for informed decisions and responsible action in response to challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource use, and inequality. It reaches across what people learn, how they learn, and the environments in which learning occurs. UNESCO’s current framing also emphasizes cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral dimensions of learning (UNESCO, 2026).

This breadth explains why ESD often intersects with environmental education, climate education, global citizenship education, human-rights education, peace education, and civic learning. The fields share significant territory while retaining distinct centers of gravity. Broad overlap can coexist with meaningful differences.

Where is ESD in the United States?

A reader encountering ESD for the first time may reasonably ask: Is it a school subject, a curriculum, a professional field, or a United Nations policy term? Why does it sound unfamiliar when many of its concerns already appear throughout American education?

ESD is present in the United States through research projects, universities, professional networks, nonprofit organizations, international programs, and individual schools and educators. The Smithsonian Science Education Center, for example, uses the language of Educating for Sustainable Development. In a 2023 survey conducted with Gallup, U.S. teachers expressed strong interest in teaching about sustainable development. They also reported limited time, expertise, curricular alignment, materials, and institutional support, often at higher rates than teachers in the international sample (Smithsonian Institution, 2023).

The U.S. Department of Education uses a different cluster of terms. Its Infrastructure and Sustainability initiative refers to environmental sustainability learning, climate literacy, green workforce development, outdoor learning, environmental justice, healthy and sustainable facilities, and capacity for climate mitigation and adaptation in schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2026). The vocabulary distributes sustainability-related work among facilities, health, environment, science, careers, justice, outdoor learning, and local initiatives.

ESD currently appears through overlapping purposes and practices across many institutions, with limited national coordination. The acronym may be unfamiliar even when a school is pursuing pieces of the larger mission.

A map of the territory

In this article, sustainability-related education serves as a practical umbrella for mapping these overlapping traditions. It is a descriptive convenience, and each field retains its own history and emphasis. The terms below help educators notice what a program or proposal is designed to illuminate.

Environment, climate, and place. Environmental education has more than five decades of professional infrastructure in North America. The North American Association for Environmental Education describes it as a process through which people learn about the environment, develop understanding and skills, consider multiple perspectives, and engage thoughtfully with complex issues. Environmental literacy commonly names the capacities involved in understanding environmental conditions and making informed decisions (North American Association for Environmental Education, n.d.-a, n.d.-b).

Climate education and climate literacy concentrate attention on climate systems, evidence, consequences, communication, mitigation, adaptation, and decision-making, often alongside social, economic, political, health, and justice dimensions. Place-based education begins with local heritage, cultures, landscapes, and experience. Environmental justice education foregrounds unequal benefits, risks, burdens, voice, and decision-making power (North American Association for Environmental Education, n.d.-c; Promise of Place, n.d.).

Citizenship, rights, peace, and interdependence. Civic education centers democratic knowledge, institutions, participation, public reasoning, and the responsibilities of civic life. Its standards, course requirements, assessments, service-learning provisions, and funding vary across states (iCivics, 2025).

Global competence and global citizenship education turn attention toward local-global interdependence, cultural understanding, multiple perspectives, communication across difference, and participation in a connected world. A widely used global-competence framework developed through Asia Society and the Council of Chief State School Officers emphasizes investigating the world, recognizing perspectives, communicating ideas, and taking action (Asia Society, n.d.).

Human-rights education brings precision to dignity, rights holders, institutional duties, discrimination, protection, and accountability. Peace education often centers violence and nonviolence, conflict, cooperation, reconciliation, and the conditions supporting cultures of peace. Both meet ESD around justice, participation, institutions, and human flourishing (UNESCO, 2023).

Sustainability frameworks and whole-institution initiatives. Terms such as sustainability education, education for sustainability, and Education for Sustainable Development usually take a wider systems view. They consider relationships among ecological integrity, social justice, economic viability, culture, institutions, and present and future generations. ESD adds an international policy architecture through SDG Target 4.7 and UNESCO’s ESD for 2030 framework (UNESCO, 2026).

Green schools and sustainable schools bring the institutional setting into view. UNESCO describes a green school as one that integrates sustainability into governance, facilities and operations, teaching and learning, and community engagement. The U.S. Department of Education similarly connects sustainable facilities with health, equity, environmental learning, outdoor spaces, and institutional capacity (UNESCO, n.d.; U.S. Department of Education, 2026).

Pedagogies and capacities. Systems thinking, futures thinking, project-based learning, inquiry, interdisciplinary learning, community-based learning, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and participatory research often support sustainability-related education. These terms usually describe ways of learning, designing, or reasoning. Their contribution depends on the purposes, content, relationships, and evidence present in a particular educational experience.

A project may use interdisciplinary teams while leaving sustainability unexamined. A climate lesson may develop accurate scientific knowledge with little attention to public decisions or unequal exposure. The name provides an initial clue; the educational design reveals the fuller meaning.

One condition, several educational lenses

Consider extreme heat in Phoenix.

Climate education might examine temperature trends, greenhouse gases, projections, mitigation, and adaptation. Environmental-health education might address physiological risk, air quality, hydration, and exposure. Environmental justice education might ask why particular neighborhoods, workers, schools, and families experience greater heat burdens.

Place-based education could begin with desert landscapes, neighborhood conditions, local history, and knowledge developed through living in the region. Civic education might examine municipal decisions, school policies, public infrastructure, and opportunities for participation. Human-rights education could raise questions about health, dignity, protection, discrimination, and institutional responsibility.

An ESD approach can bring these dimensions into relationship. It might ask how ecological, social, economic, educational, and institutional systems interact; what learners need to understand and judge; how schools themselves respond to heat; whose knowledge carries authority; and which forms of participation fit the context.

Each lens changes what becomes visible. ESD is especially useful when an educational question requires several dimensions to be examined together.

Why the words matter

For teachers, terminology influences whether a concern feels relevant to their discipline and where they look for support. A music teacher may place “climate education” entirely within science. A social studies teacher may recognize civic participation while overlooking material systems, ecological limits, or intergenerational consequences. An educator already using place-based or environmental-justice inquiry may hear “ESD” as an unfamiliar initiative, even when the framework could help clarify and extend existing work.

Teachers can ask what educational purpose is already present, how it relates to sustainability, which dimensions remain underdeveloped, and whether the work calls for new knowledge, careful design, or partnership.

For teacher educators, the vocabulary raises questions of program coherence. A preparation program may address diversity in one course, climate in science methods, citizenship in social studies, community engagement in clinical practice, and global competence through international education. Candidates may encounter each concern without receiving a map of their relationships. Teacher education needs a considered answer to what future educators should understand, recognize, design, facilitate, and assess in relation to interconnected sustainability challenges.

For administrators and policymakers, terms influence where initiatives are housed, who receives professional development, which standards apply, and what receives stable staffing or funding. Parallel initiatives can develop with limited communication. Greater coherence requires aligned structures, resources, authority, preparation, and evaluation.

Parents, voters, and the wider public also need a usable map. They may see these terms in curriculum proposals, school-board discussions, state standards, university programs, candidate statements, or facilities plans. Climate literacy, civic education, green schools, global competence, and ESD can trigger different assumptions before anyone examines the educational substance. Public understanding improves when people can ask what learners will study, what capabilities they are expected to develop, how disagreement will be handled, what evidence will be used, and how success will be assessed.

Why I use ESD

I use ESD as the principal framework for my work because it fits the questions I am pursuing.

Its scope includes ecological, social, cultural, economic, and institutional conditions. Its educational focus includes knowledge, values, judgment, capabilities, learning environments, participation, and action. Its implementation architecture connects policy, learning environments, educator capacity, youth, and local action. These features make ESD particularly useful for studying how broad international commitments become intelligible, usable, assessable, and contextually responsible within education (UNESCO, 2026).

ESD also gives me a coherent way to connect teacher education with disciplinary learning. My own area of depth is music learning and teaching, yet the framework travels beyond one subject. It invites educators to examine how their disciplines participate in larger systems, what distinctive forms of understanding they can cultivate, and where their contributions have clear limits.

Other frameworks deepen this work. Environmental education offers ecological and place-based traditions. Human-rights education provides concepts of rights, duties, protection, and accountability. Peace education offers resources for conflict and reconciliation. Civic and global citizenship education deepen questions of participation, belonging, and interdependence.

ESD functions as an integrative spine for my mission. It provides coherence, an established international vocabulary, and an implementation pathway, with companion traditions guiding questions that require their particular depth. This is a reasoned choice grounded in the purposes of my work.

Learning to read the map

The United States may continue to use several languages for this work. Varied terminology can preserve valuable histories, disciplinary knowledge, and locally meaningful ways of speaking. Shared understanding can still grow across those differences.

A useful map helps us ask: What does this initiative emphasize? Which tradition informs it? What relationships does it reveal? Which dimensions receive less attention? How does it connect with curriculum, teacher preparation, school operations, youth participation, community knowledge, and public decision-making?

Those questions move the conversation beyond a contest among acronyms. They help us recognize the work already underway and see where stronger connections, deeper preparation, or clearer public language may be needed.

What parts of this larger educational landscape are already present in your setting—and what becomes visible when you begin to see them as related?

If any of this resonated—or if you think I am getting something wrong—I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into—something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on—please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing—even at the free level—helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities—linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett.

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References

Asia Society. (n.d.). Global competency. Retrieved August 2, 2026, from https://sites.asiasociety.org/education/globalcompetence/

iCivics. (2025, August 25). 2025 state policy scan provides updated insight into civic learning policies, state by state. CivxNow. https://civxnow.org/2025-state-policy-scan/

North American Association for Environmental Education. (n.d.-a). About. Retrieved August 2, 2026, from https://naaee.org/about

North American Association for Environmental Education. (n.d.-b). Environmental literacy framework. Retrieved August 2, 2026, from https://naaee.org/about/ee/environmental-literacy-framework

North American Association for Environmental Education. (n.d.-c). What is climate literacy? Retrieved August 2, 2026, from https://naaee.org/programs/coalition/resources/what-climate-literacy

OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT Images [AI image generator]. https://chatgpt.com/

Promise of Place. (n.d.). What is place-based education? Retrieved August 2, 2026, from https://www.promiseofplace.org/what-is-pbe/what-is-place-based-education

Smithsonian Institution. (2023). Educating for sustainable development: Perspectives of U.S. and global educators report. https://ssec.si.edu/educating-for-sustainable-development-report

UNESCO. (n.d.). Q&A: What you need to know about green schools. Retrieved August 2, 2026, from https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/what-you-need-know-about-green-schools

UNESCO. (2023, November 20). Recommendation on Education for Peace and Human Rights, International Understanding, Cooperation, Fundamental Freedoms, Global Citizenship and Sustainable Development. https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-education-peace-and-human-rights-international-understanding-cooperation-fundamental

UNESCO. (2026, July 17). Education for sustainable development: What you need to know. https://www.unesco.org/en/sustainable-development/education/need-know

U.S. Department of Education. (2026, June 29). Infrastructure and sustainability. http://www.ed.gov/about/initiatives/infrastructure-and-sustainability

Before the First Sound

Pause a song one second before it begins.

Nothing has reached your ears yet. Still, an enormous amount has already happened.

Someone needed time to learn, experiment, practice, or remember. They needed a voice, instrument, device, or some other way of turning intention into sound. Perhaps they needed a room, electricity, software, headphones, internet access, transportation, childcare, or a teacher. Someone built the instrument, wrote the code, repaired the cable, engineered the recording, organized the event, preserved the tradition, or showed another person how the music goes.

Rules have already shaped what happens next. Who owns the recording? Who receives credit? Who is paid? Who absorbs the cost when the equipment breaks? Which music is promoted, archived, taught, or treated as valuable? Who has enough time and security to participate at all?

Before music becomes audible, an economy has already begun deciding what is possible.

We tend to notice that economy only when something fails: a program loses funding, a student cannot afford an instrument, a venue closes, a musician cannot make rent, a device becomes obsolete, or a community loses the conditions needed to carry a practice forward. The crisis makes the system visible, but the system was present all along.

The Economy Was Already in the Room

This series has used the Sustainable Development Goals “wedding cake” model developed by the Stockholm Resilience Center (2016).

The model places economies within societies, and societies within the biosphere. Environmental, social, and economic development are therefore nested within the same living system rather than treated as separate projects competing for attention. Its economic tier contains SDGs 8, 9, 10, and 12: decent work and economic growth; industry, innovation, and infrastructure; reduced inequalities; and responsible consumption and production (Rockström & Sukhdev, 2016; United Nations, 2015).

In the first part of this series, I examined the living foundation beneath musical life: water, climate, energy, materials, biodiversity, and the ecological conditions that allow people and cultures to continue. In the second, I moved into the social tier: health, food, education, equality, peace, community, and the institutions that shape whether people can participate.

The economic tier asks how those conditions are organized, valued, and distributed.

Who has time? Who has tools? Who performs the labor? Who receives compensation, recognition, ownership, and opportunity? Who carries the risk? What resources are consumed? Which forms of musical life can continue—and which become possible only for people who can afford the entrance fee?

These questions already live inside music classrooms. They appear when a student is asked to record something at home, when instruments are assigned, when travel is required, when unpaid family labor keeps a program functioning, or when some forms of musicianship receive institutional investment while others remain less visible.

Some traditions enter funding and scheduling conversations with established legitimacy. A request to support an orchestral string program, for example, may be understood as a routine part of school music because large-ensemble models grounded primarily in Western classical traditions have long occupied a dominant position in U.S. music education (Heuser, 2011; Johnson, 2004). Mariachi educators, by contrast, have described needing to establish and defend their programs’ legitimacy while navigating institutional barriers and established school-music norms (Tucker et al., 2026).

Those unequal starting positions can shape which programs receive curricular time, academic credit, staffing, facilities, and sustained financial support. The difference is not simply which instruments schools purchase—violins belong to both orchestral and mariachi traditions—but which forms of musical knowledge institutions are already organized to recognize and sustain.

I first encountered a smaller version of this distinction at the first school where I taught, where more than fifty languages were spoken in students’ homes. The first time I played “Happy Birthday” for the class, I automatically began with the version I had grown up hearing. Several students stopped me.

“Wait, Mr. Bartlett—that isn’t the version we sing at home.”

It was a formative lesson for me as both a teacher and a person. Even something I had assumed was culturally universal existed in multiple forms, carried through different languages, families, and traditions. What felt standard to me was only one version—one that happened to arrive in the classroom already recognized.

That moment points toward a larger institutional question: Which forms of musical knowledge enter school already treated as standard, and which become visible only when students interrupt the curriculum to name what it has overlooked?

Those judgments can shape economic investment. Schools are more readily able to fund, schedule, staff, and award credit to musical practices that fit structures they already recognize. Other practices may remain dependent upon individual teachers, volunteer labor, extracurricular time, or students’ willingness to introduce knowledge the institution has not yet learned to recognize (Heuser, 2011; Johnson, 2004; Tucker et al., 2026).

In my regional survey of 102 K–12 music educators, the economic dimension was the least frequently recognized of the four dimensions of sustainability I presented, selected by 41.2% of respondents (Bartlett, 2025). That result makes sense to me. Teachers encounter budgets, access, labor, technology, purchasing, and inequality constantly, but they are rarely given a framework that reveals these as parts of the same system.

The central question, then, reaches beyond how much money music generates:

What has to be economically possible for someone to have a musical life—and who receives those conditions?

Who Gets to Build a Life in Music?

SDG 8 brings together employment, decent work, labor rights, creativity, entrepreneurship, productivity, and resource efficiency (United Nations, 2015). Its language matters because musical work is surrounded by a persistent contradiction: music is woven throughout social life, yet much of the labor that produces it remains unseen or precarious.

The performer is visible. The composing, arranging, teaching, rehearsing, transporting, repairing, promoting, scheduling, administering, recording, editing, and emotional labor surrounding the performance may be much harder to see.

A UNESCO report on employment in cultural and creative industries found that 40% of workers in the sector earn less than their national minimum wage, while informality, precarity, and gender disparities remain deeply entrenched (UNESCO, 2026). Loving the work does not make insecure conditions decent. Exposure does not substitute for compensation. Entrepreneurship can open real possibilities, but it cannot repair labor systems that transfer nearly all risk to individual creators.

For music educators, the immediate invitation is not to turn every student into a professional musician or small-business owner. It is to make musical labor perceptible.

Who tuned the piano? Who wrote the arrangement? Who loaded the equipment? Who made the software? Who taught the technique? Who booked the room, secured the permissions, ran the sound, or cleaned the space afterward? Which contributions receive applause, and which disappear into the background?

Students can learn to hear more than the finished product. They can learn that music becomes possible through networks of skill, knowledge, care, and work. That recognition can support more honest conversations about careers, but it also matters for students who never pursue music professionally. It teaches them to notice how value is created—and how easily some contributors are omitted from the story.

Who Has the Tools to Create?

Imagine a young person producing a track on a borrowed laptop.

The technology may look like an equalizer. A single device can contain instruments, recording equipment, editing tools, an archive of musical references, and a route to an audience. Yet the apparent simplicity conceals an infrastructure.

The student may also need reliable electricity, broadband, storage space, compatible software, functioning headphones, a quiet place, time that is not already claimed by work or caregiving, and enough technical knowledge to solve problems when something stops working. They may need accessible interfaces, a school network that does not block the platform, and an adult who recognizes beat-making as legitimate musical learning rather than time spent “playing on a computer.”

SDG 9 concerns sustainable and resilient infrastructure, innovation, technological capacity, and affordable, equitable access. Its targets include infrastructure that supports human well-being and wider access to information and communications technology (United Nations, 2015). In musical life, infrastructure includes much more than concert halls and rehearsal rooms. It includes broadband, libraries, studios, community centers, public spaces, repair systems, archives, transportation, devices, software, and the social networks through which knowledge travels.

This is where economist Amartya Sen’s capability approach offers a useful distinction. Rather than evaluating well-being through income or resources alone, the capability approach asks what people are genuinely able to do and become with the opportunities available to them (Sen, 1999).

A student can technically possess a device without having a genuine opportunity to create. An instrument may be available during school while remaining inaccessible for home practice. A free app may still require a newer phone, data, privacy, technical fluency, or an account that the student cannot create.

Equal resources do not automatically produce equal capabilities because people encounter those resources through different bodies, schedules, responsibilities, histories, and environments (Sen, 1999).

That changes the teacher’s question. Beyond asking whether a resource was made available, we might also ask:

What does this opportunity quietly require before a student can actually use it?

Who Gets to Participate—and Benefit?

SDG 10 focuses on reducing inequalities by expanding inclusion, equal opportunity, representation, and more equitable outcomes (United Nations, 2015). In music, inequality is frequently discussed through the price of participation: instruments, lessons, uniforms, travel, fees, software, tickets, or devices.

Those costs matter. They are also only part of what is distributed.

Music programs distribute time with the teacher. They distribute desirable instruments, advanced courses, solos, leadership, feedback, public visibility, access to technology, and invitations into professional networks. They distribute messages about which musical knowledge counts, who appears talented, what professionalism looks like, and which forms of participation deserve institutional space.

Outside schools, platforms and industries distribute attention, discoverability, ownership, revenue, and risk. Communities may create musical forms and knowledge that others later package, teach, record, or profit from. A person can be heard widely while retaining little control over the conditions of that visibility.

None of this means that every unequal result originates in one classroom decision. Teachers work within schedules, budgets, traditions, policies, facilities, and inherited program structures that they did not create. Awareness does, however, make local patterns easier to examine.

What is being distributed here besides money? Who consistently receives more of it? What does participation assume about transportation, prior training, family schedules, disability, technology, language, or unpaid time? Where could one gate be lowered without pretending that a local adjustment solves the larger system?

These are questions for working underneath the hood of one’s own context. The answers will differ across schools and communities. They also become more accurate when students and families are treated as sources of knowledge rather than merely recipients of a teacher’s solution.

What Does Musical Life Ask of the World?

Every instrument, microphone, laptop, speaker, cable, stage light, uniform, piece of merchandise, and touring vehicle enters musical life through material systems. Even apparently immaterial forms of music depend upon bodies, energy, devices, storage, networks, and places.

SDG 12 addresses sustainable consumption and production, including the management of natural resources, waste prevention, reuse, sustainable procurement, and public awareness of the consequences of consumption (United Nations, 2015). It brings the economic tier back down into the biosphere.

A music program constantly acquires, maintains, shares, stores, repairs, and eventually disposes of things. The most useful educational question may therefore reach beyond whether an item belongs in a recycling bin.

How long was it designed to last? Can it be repaired locally? What knowledge disappears when replacement becomes easier than maintenance? Which materials and forms of labor produced it? Who bears the environmental cost after it leaves the classroom?

Consider the difference between replacing a damaged instrument and sustaining a repair ecology. Repair requires skilled people, tools, parts, institutional memory, time, and a financial model that allows the work to continue. It can preserve materials, extend access, support local livelihoods, and teach a different relationship to objects: one shaped by durability and stewardship.

This does not mean every purchase is irresponsible or that teachers should audit global supply chains before ordering a cable. Musical life participates in material systems, and those systems can be made available for inquiry.

Students might follow one object backward: an instrument, controller, pair of headphones, vinyl record, or phone. What had to happen before it arrived? What will happen after it is discarded? Who and what remain outside the frame when we see only the finished object?

Price Is Only One Measure of Value

Economic language can make music educators uneasy because it often seems to ask music to prove itself through jobs, revenue, tourism, test scores, or some other external return. Those outcomes can matter. They do not contain the whole value of musical life.

A lullaby passed through a family may have little market price. A community song may sustain memory without creating a measurable financial return. Friends making music in a living room, a congregation singing together, a teenager building a private world through headphones, or an elder teaching a child how a song belongs within a ceremony may never appear in an economic-impact report.

Yet these practices still require conditions. People need time, safety, health, space, continuity, and some measure of control over their cultural lives. A society’s economy influences whether those conditions are widely available or increasingly reserved for people with money, flexibility, infrastructure, and institutional recognition.

This is why the capability question matters. A healthy musical economy should be judged partly by whether people possess real opportunities to create, learn, listen, participate, work, inherit, transform, and share music in forms they have reason to value (Sen, 1999).

Music has economic value. It also carries artistic, social, personal, civic, and cultural forms of value that exceed price. Economic sustainability should create conditions under which those values can continue without requiring every musical practice to become profitable before it deserves support.

What Makes a Musical Life Possible?

Return to the song paused before its first sound.

The biosphere is there in the materials, energy, water, climate, bodies, and living systems upon which the music depends. Society is there in education, health, nourishment, safety, culture, equality, community, and the institutions that allow people to gather and participate. The economy is there in the distribution of time, labor, tools, infrastructure, ownership, recognition, opportunity, and material resources.

The wedding cake is a single living arrangement viewed at different scales.

For a music educator, this does not create an obligation to add four more goals to an already crowded curriculum. It offers a more accurate picture of what is already happening.

An instrument assignment can carry questions about access and capability. A recording project can reveal infrastructure and ownership. A performance can make invisible labor visible. A purchasing decision can open questions about durability and repair. A piece of music can become a map of the human and material systems that allowed it to exist.

Perhaps the most portable place to begin is with three questions:

Before the first sound, what had to be available?

Who contributed labor, knowledge, materials, attention, or care—and who received compensation, recognition, ownership, or opportunity?

What assumption about time, cost, equipment, technology, or participation could be reconsidered in this particular context?

A sustainable musical economy would not be measured only by how much revenue music generates. We would also see it in whether people possess genuine opportunities to enter and shape musical life—and whether those opportunities can continue without hiding intolerable costs in another worker’s precarity, another community’s exclusion, or another generation’s depleted world.

What would it take for more people not only to hear music, but to enter, shape, sustain, and call a musical life their own?

If any of this resonated—or if you think I am getting something wrong—I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into—something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on—please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing—even at the free level—helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities—linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett.

Share Teaching for a Complex World

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References

Bartlett, K. C. (2025). Education for Sustainable Development in K–12 Music Education: A Survey Study of Teacher Perspectives and Practices in the Southwestern United States [ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3281118753?pq-origsite=primo&accountid=4485

Heuser, F. (2011). Ensemble-based instrumental music instruction: Dead-end tradition or opportunity for socially enlightened teaching. Music Education Research, 13(3), 293–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2011.603043

Johnson Jr., B. L. (2004). A Sound Education for All: Multicultural Issues in Music Education. Educational Policy, 18(1), 116–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904803260028

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E., Lenton, T. M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H. J., Nykvist, B., de Wit, C. A., Hughes, T., van der Leeuw, S., Rodhe, H., Sörlin, S., Snyder, P. K., Costanza, R., Svedin, U., … Foley, J. (2009). Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2). https://doi.org/10/gd53h4

Sen, A. (2001). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press. https://raggeduniversity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/1_x_senDevelopmentasFreedom-_compressed.pdf

Stockholm Resilience Center. (2016, June 14). The SDGs wedding cake [Text]. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2016-06-14-the-sdgs-wedding-cake.html

Tucker, O. G., Nicholson, G., & Knight, T. C. (2026). “Hey, Our Program Is Legitimate”: A Phenomenology of Mariachi Educators’ Experiences in Public Schools. Journal of Research in Music Education, 00224294251414651. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224294251414651

UNDESA. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development | Department of Economic and Social Affairs. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda

UNESCO. (2026). Skills and employment in the culture and creative industries: Strategic frameworks and promising initiatives. UNESCO. https://doi.org/10.54675/WAFG1116

United Nations. (n.d.). Communications materials. Retrieved June 4, 2026, from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/

In the previous installment, we followed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through the social life of a music classroom. We considered hunger and poverty, health and education, energy and housing, gender equity, community life, and the institutions that support them. These relationships are readily visible because music educators work with people. They build communities, negotiate differences, distribute opportunities, and create cultures of participation every day.

The social layer rests within a living world that makes collective life possible. Follow food in a school cafeteria backward and it leads to farms, soil, rainfall, labor, transportation, energy, and climate. Follow the water bottle beside a student’s chair and it leads to rivers and reservoirs. Beyond them are treatment plants, infrastructure, policy, and geography. Follow an instrument far enough and it may lead to forests, mines, animals, factories, shipping routes, electrical grids, and generations of accumulated craft knowledge.

Every social system eventually descends into the biosphere, the thin layer of Earth where life is possible. This foundation includes four SDGs: SDG 6, Clean Water and Sanitation; SDG 13, Climate Action; SDG 14, Life Below Water; and SDG 15, Life on Land (United Nations, 2015).

The Foundation Under the Cafeteria

The United Nations presents the SDGs as an integrated agenda. The “wedding cake” model (Rockström et al., 2009) rearranges them into a structure that makes their interdependence especially visible. The economic goals rest upon the goals concerned with society, and both depend upon the biosphere as their living foundation (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2016).

This structure changes the question we ask of music education. Environmental sustainability often enters through climate-themed repertoire, recycling projects, or special concert programs. These can support worthwhile learning, although the relationship begins earlier than any particular lesson. Biological conditions, material resources, climate systems, and public infrastructure already make music learning possible.

The guiding question, then, is: What living systems already make music learning and teaching possible?

SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

SDG 6 concerns access to safe water and sanitation. It also addresses the sustainable management of water resources and the protection of freshwater ecosystems (United Nations, 2015). These concerns are central to sustainability because communities cannot maintain public health, food systems, education, or economic life without dependable water.

Sustainability efforts connected with SDG 6 therefore involve more than conserving water at the household level. They also require healthy watersheds, functioning infrastructure, equitable access, responsible governance, and long-term planning. The goal asks societies to protect the systems that provide water while ensuring that people can use those systems safely and fairly.

Water enters musical life most immediately through the body. Singers and wind players depend on hydration, as do dancers, conductors, and teachers. This need becomes especially visible during long rehearsals, marching seasons, and outdoor performances. A reminder to bring water belongs to ordinary rehearsal practice, while the ability to follow that reminder depends on reliable access to clean water and the systems that provide it.

Living in a desert region has made these relationships concrete for me because water and heat shape many ordinary decisions surrounding schools and musical activity. That experience offers one local point of entry into a global question that every community encounters differently.

A music teacher might begin with hydration and examine its effects on concentration, endurance, vocal production, and physical safety. A class could investigate where its school water comes from and what happens before it reaches the drinking fountain. Students might listen closely to rain, rivers, drainage systems, or drought-altered landscapes and use those sounds as material for composition. They could also trace the water involved in producing a reed, a sheet of paper, or another object used in the music room.

Through these approaches, students begin to understand water as one of the conditions supporting musical participation. They also learn that sustainability involves maintaining the ecological and human systems upon which everyday activities depend.

Water reveals how environmental systems shape bodies, infrastructure, schedules, and safety. Those relationships become even more visible when we turn toward climate.

SDG 13: Climate Action

SDG 13 calls for action on climate change through mitigation, adaptation, education, and stronger capacity to respond to climate-related hazards (United Nations, 2015). Climate action is central to sustainability because climate conditions influence food production, water availability, public health, migration, ecosystems, infrastructure, and economic stability.

Mitigation seeks to reduce the causes of climate change, particularly greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation focuses on preparing for effects that are already occurring or are likely to occur. Sustainability efforts require both because communities must limit future harm while also responding to present conditions.

Climate change already enters schools through practical decisions about heat, smoke, energy use, travel, and outdoor activity. In music programs, these conditions can affect whether students rehearse outside, whether performances can proceed safely, and how much cooling a facility requires. Heat and humidity can also affect instruments, rehearsal spaces, and storage conditions.

A storage room can therefore become a place where environmental conditions are observed over time. A rehearsal calendar may also document adaptation as outdoor practices shift, performances move, or schedules change in response to unsafe conditions.

Music educators can help students investigate these relationships through songwriting or soundscape study. They might use recording projects to document changes in a local environment, translate climate data into sound, or collaborate with science and social studies classes. Students might also imagine possible futures through composition and design, asking how musical life could change as communities adapt.

Musical activity can help communities preserve memory and communicate experience. It can also support collective reflection when familiar places or ways of life begin to change. These cultural and educational responses contribute to sustainability by helping people understand shared conditions, imagine alternatives, and participate in decisions about the future.

Climate connects every region to larger planetary processes. Following those connections outward eventually leads to oceans, whose influence may be less visible from an inland classroom but remains essential to the stability of life on Earth.

SDG 14: Life Below Water

SDG 14 concerns the conservation and sustainable use of oceans, seas, and marine resources (United Nations, 2015). Oceans support biodiversity, regulate climate, absorb heat and carbon dioxide, produce much of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and sustain the livelihoods of communities around the world.

Sustainability efforts associated with this goal include reducing pollution, protecting marine habitats, limiting destructive extraction, and supporting responsible use of ocean resources. The goal recognizes that ocean health affects life far beyond coastlines because marine systems help regulate the entire planet.

For many inland music classrooms, SDG 14 may feel more distant than the other Biosphere goals. That distance deserves to remain visible because systems thinking requires proportion. Communities do not encounter every ecological issue with the same immediacy, even though they remain connected through planetary and economic systems.

Several meaningful relationships remain available to music educators. Instruments, electronics, replacement parts, and other classroom materials often travel through international shipping networks that depend on oceans. That connection allows students to consider how musical objects move through global systems before reaching a school.

Marine environments also offer powerful possibilities for acoustic inquiry. Many aquatic animals rely on sound to communicate, navigate, locate food, avoid predators, and interpret their surroundings. Human-generated noise can interfere with these essential activities and alter the character of marine habitats (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2024).

Students might listen to recordings of marine environments and compare biological sounds with those produced by ships or sonar. They could investigate ocean noise as a question of habitat and communication. Music classes might also explore the musical histories of coastal and island communities, paying attention to how marine environments shape culture and livelihood.

These pathways allow SDG 14 to enter with an appropriate degree of weight. They also demonstrate an important sustainability principle: a system can affect us profoundly even when its presence is difficult to see from where we stand.

Where the ocean may enter an inland classroom indirectly, the living systems represented by SDG 15 are often visible in the instruments and materials already in students’ hands.

SDG 15: Life on Land

SDG 15 concerns the protection and restoration of terrestrial ecosystems. Its focus includes forests, soils, biodiversity, and landscapes affected by degradation (United Nations, 2015). Healthy land systems support food production, store carbon, regulate water, provide habitats, and supply many of the materials upon which human communities depend.

Sustainability efforts connected with SDG 15 seek to protect biodiversity while restoring damaged ecosystems and using natural resources responsibly. The goal asks people to consider how present choices affect the capacity of land to support life in the future.

The relationship with music becomes visible through materials. Wooden instruments begin in forests, while reeds begin as plants. Bow hair comes from animals. Cork, cane, leather, metals, resins, paper, and electronic components pass through ecological and industrial systems before entering musical life.

An instrument can therefore be understood as an artistic object and a tool, as well as a material supply chain. Its construction carries histories of cultivation, extraction, manufacturing, transportation, maintenance, and accumulated knowledge. Some of its materials may have taken years or decades to grow and prepare.

Students might trace one material found in an instrument and follow it back toward its source. They could investigate how a reed is grown, how instrument wood is selected, or where metals in electronic equipment originate. This inquiry can lead toward questions of durability, sourcing, manufacturing, and waste.

Repair offers another practical entry point. Maintaining an instrument extends its usable life and preserves the labor and materials already gathered inside it. Students can therefore understand repair as a musical skill, an economic decision, and a sustainability practice.

SDG 15 also creates opportunities to learn from land. Outdoor listening can help students attend to seasonal changes and the distinctive sounds of a place. Place-based composition can explore relationships among landscape, history, community, and cultural practice.

Together, these approaches invite students to ask what forms of life, labor, and time are gathered inside the materials that make music possible. They also show that sustainability involves protecting the living systems from which human culture continually draws.

Learning to See What Was Already There

One of the first Education for Sustainable Development activities I encountered asked learners to photograph a meal and identify its ingredients. They then investigated where those ingredients came from and connected the meal with the SDGs.

Although the activity began with breakfast, its deeper lesson concerned perception. A piece of toast could become soil and water. It could also reveal seed, labor, transportation, packaging, energy, trade, health, and culture. The food remained the same, while the learner’s capacity to recognize the systems gathered inside it expanded.

I later adapted that activity with university students. After tracing food through several SDGs, I asked them to list the “ingredients” that made up their instruments. At the time, I was still working to understand how sustainability connected with music technology and music education. I felt uncertain about whether the lesson would hold together. Some students saw the connections quickly, while others remained unconvinced.

That uncertainty matters because sustainability education remains an emerging area of practice for many music educators. In the United States, the relationship between sustainability and music learning can still sound misplaced or unnecessary. Many teachers have received little preparation, time, language, or institutional support for understanding it.

The need to develop that understanding is becoming more urgent as the SDGs approach their 2030 target date. The United Nations’ 2026 assessment reports meaningful progress across the agenda, although global gains remain uneven and insufficient. Many targets continue to advance too slowly or move backward (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2026).

Education shapes what people notice and what they value. It influences what they regard as normal and what kinds of futures they can imagine. Music education, understood broadly as the places and relationships through which people learn, make, share, and pass music forward, participates in that influence.

Recognizing the environmental relationships already present in musical life can give educators the confidence to develop them intentionally. The form those connections take will depend on the context. One teacher may examine instrument materials, while another may compose from a local water history. A program might study a changing soundscape, reconsider outdoor rehearsal practices, repair neglected equipment, or invite students to imagine the musical cultures of a more sustainable future.

The SDGs provide a shared language through which local experiences can connect with larger systems. They help educators ask more expansive questions while preserving the professional knowledge and judgment that responsible teaching requires.

Viewed together, the Biosphere goals ask us to look beneath the visible life of a music classroom. Hydration rests upon water access. Rehearsal calendars reflect climate. Global musical commerce crosses oceans. Instruments carry land, life, labor, material, and time.

The task is to see music education more fully and decide which relationships deserve attention, care, and action within a particular place. As you look around the places where music is learned and made in your own life, consider this question: What living systems make that music possible, and what might become possible if you and your students began noticing them together?

If any of this resonated — or if you think I am getting something wrong — I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into — something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on — please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing — even at the free level — helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities — linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett

References

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2024, June 16). What is ocean noise? National Ocean Service. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-noise.html

Stockholm Resilience Centre. (2016, June 14). The SDGs wedding cake. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2016-06-14-the-sdgs-wedding-cake.html

United Nations. (n.d.). Communications materials. Retrieved June 4, 2026, from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/

United Nations. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2026). The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2026/

The auditorium falls silent, and a seventh grader lifts her flute to her lips for the eight measures she’s been rehearsing since September. She has the fingerings. She has the breath control her lessons taught her. What she doesn’t have, this particular Tuesday, is breakfast — her mom’s shift ran long, the bus came early, and the granola bar in her backpack is for lunch, not now. She plays anyway. The tone is thin where it should be full. Nobody in the audience will know why. Nobody has ever put “did the kids eat” on a rehearsal checklist, because nobody thinks of hunger as a music problem.

It is one. The body a musician plays through has requirements before it has technique, and breath, in particular, does not negotiate with an empty stomach.

I’ve been circling this problem since the last piece in this series, the one about who gets to be a music kid. That piece was about fees and trip costs — the gates with price tags on them. But underneath it, the whole time, sat a gate with no price tag at all: a body that hasn’t eaten. I said then that I’d been talking around hunger. This is where I stop talking around it.

A Map, Not the Territory

This series has, until now, walked the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals — the blueprint, adopted by nearly every country in 2015, for what a livable, dignified world requires by 2030 — one at a time, a piece per goal, in order. Starting here, that changes, and it’s worth saying why before the argument gets underway.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s “wedding cake” model sorts the seventeen goals into tiers: a biosphere layer at the base, a society layer above it, an economy layer above that, with partnership running through all three (Rockström & Sukhdev, 2016). Starting with this piece, I’m going to take the goals in those tiers, in clusters, rather than one at a time.

I want to be honest about why, because both reasons are real. It’s more efficient — seventeen separate essays would mean making the same interconnection argument seventeen times. And it’s more honest to what this whole series has been claiming. Nothing in a child’s life arrives labeled “Goal 2” or “Goal 4.” Hunger, learning, health, and safety happen to one kid, in one body, at one time. The tiers are a way to hold a seventeen-part problem in a human-sized hand — a map folded small enough to fit in a pocket, useful precisely because it leaves things out. The trick, and it’s a trick worth naming out loud, is to keep using the map without mistaking it for the ground it’s standing on.

One Loop, Eight Names

Start with the flute player and follow the thread outward, instead of stopping at “she didn’t eat breakfast.” Eight official goals live on this thread — the full society tier of the wedding cake, not a convenient subset of it. Each one has a number, a global target most readers have never had explained to them plainly, and a reason it already belongs to you, whether anyone told you that or not. Walk all eight.

Hunger — SDG 2, Zero Hunger. Globally, this is the UN target for ending hunger and malnutrition and making sure every person has reliable access to enough food — not a distant crisis but a number the world is still a long way from closing. In a rehearsal room, it looks like a body that hasn’t eaten, being asked to do something breath doesn’t grant on an empty stomach. It’s also, quietly, the reason a lot of directors keep a drawer of granola bars nobody talks about. Nobody called that food security work. It already was — which is the point. This goal was always the kid in the third row, not a policy document sitting in Geneva, and you were already answering her.

Education — SDG 4, Quality Education. Globally, this goal is about making sure every person gets an education that actually prepares them to participate fully in the world — not just a seat filled, but learning that sticks and opportunity that follows it. A body that hasn’t eaten struggles to attend, sit still, retain, and learn — not from laziness, but from the same basic physiology that thinned that flute tone (Alaimo, Olson & Frongillo, 2001). I wrote a full installment on this goal already: education as the mechanism the other sixteen goals move through, a music classroom already operating at that leverage point without being told to. Every lesson plan you’ve ever written already had a foot in this goal, which is exactly why it matters to you: you don’t need a mandate to already be doing the work this target describes.

Poverty — SDG 1, No Poverty. Globally, this is the goal of ending poverty in all its forms, everywhere — not only the extreme poverty of distant headlines, but the ordinary, local kind that quietly decides who can afford what a program requires. A mind that struggles to learn accumulates fewer credentials and fewer of the doors that let a family climb out of the income bracket it started in — the argument the last piece in this series made at length: fees and trip costs functioning as gates, the difference between being poor and staying poor. Every fee you’ve ever quietly waived, every instrument you’ve handed out without asking too many questions, was already this work, done before it had a name. It matters to you because you’re one of the only adults positioned to notice the gate is even there.

Energy — SDG 7, Affordable and Clean Energy. Globally, this goal is about making sure everyone has access to reliable, affordable power — not a given, even in a wealthy country, once a household is choosing between the electric bill and everything else. A family that fell behind on poverty’s ledger falls behind here next: a house where the power gets shut off isn’t just dark, it’s a house where a phone can’t charge, where an amp can’t run, where practicing after dinner stops being an option because there’s no light to read the page by. It matters to you because “didn’t practice” and “the power was out” can look identical from the front of a rehearsal room, and only one of them is actually a discipline problem.

Housing and community — SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities. Globally, this goal is about making sure the places people live are safe, stable, and actually reachable — housing, transportation, public space that works for the people using it, not just the people who planned it. A family under financial pressure moves more, and moving mid-year breaks the kind of continuity an ensemble runs on — the seat a kid worked all year to earn, gone, because a lease ended. Getting to an early rehearsal depends on a bus that comes, a walk that’s safe, a ride someone had time to give. It matters to you because the student who “can never seem to get here on time” may not be describing a discipline problem either — they may be describing a transit map.

Health — SDG 3, Good Health and Well-Being. Globally, this goal covers everything from reducing preventable deaths to expanding access to care to supporting mental health at every age — health treated as something everyone is owed, not something that depends on circumstance. This is where the loop starts to compound instead of just continuing: fewer doors, a colder or hotter house, a longer or less certain commute, all held long enough, turn into worse health outright — a checkup pushed back, a prescription refilled late, a small problem that becomes an emergency because nobody caught it in time. A room that runs on routine and steady presence is already, without meaning to be, one of the more reliable health-adjacent spaces in a kid’s week — a place that notices when something’s off before a form does. It matters to you because you may be the first adult who notices, well before anyone with a clipboard does.

Gender — SDG 5, Gender Equality. Globally, this goal is about ending discrimination and violence against women and girls, and making sure opportunity and leadership don’t keep getting handed out along the same old lines. In the loop, it’s where the weight stops distributing itself evenly: who eats last in a house that’s short on food, whose schooling gets deprioritized first, whose health gets treated as the thing that can wait. Not because any one parent is choosing unfairly — because scarcity runs downhill, and it has been running down the same paths for a long time. Who gets first chair, who gets asked to solo, who gets interrupted mid-rehearsal: a program that starts watching those patterns on purpose is already doing this goal’s actual work, no separate curriculum required. It matters to you because a seating chart is a small, honest mirror of a much larger pattern — and you have more control over yours than the UN has over the larger one.

Peace and strong institutions — SDG 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. Globally, this goal is about building societies with functioning, trustworthy institutions — places where justice is reachable and safety isn’t a privilege. Every goal above holds, or it frays, depending on whether there’s a functioning institution standing behind it: a school that notices a kid has stopped eating breakfast, a clinic that’s actually open and actually affordable, a neighborhood policy hasn’t quietly abandoned. Where those institutions are strong, the loop has somewhere to be caught. Where they’re not, hunger doesn’t stay contained to a stomach — it moves, unimpeded, through every room in the house. Which means the ordinary, unglamorous reliability of a well-run music program — same room, same time, same person, every week — is already institution-building, not a neutral backdrop but the thing this goal is actually asking for. It matters to you because you may already be running one of the few reliably functioning institutions some of your students have.

That’s eight official names — hunger, education, poverty, energy, housing and community, health, gender equality, peace and strong institutions — worn by one loop, moving through one kid. It’s also a loop that widens as you follow it: it starts inside one student’s body, moves out through a family and a household’s utilities, out further into a neighborhood’s transit and housing, and lands in a community, even though the child never leaves the room.

Two of these eight, this series has already spent a full piece on: education, and poverty. I’m not re-making either case here — both are linked below if you want the fuller argument, fees and trip costs for one, the four-term hierarchy of sustainability education for the other. But watching them resurface, as two turns on the same loop rather than two unrelated essays, is its own kind of evidence. This is one loop, described from eight different rooms in the same house, rather than seventeen separate problems that happen to share a syllabus.

What’s on the Other Side of the Door

Here is where it would be easy, and wrong, to reach for the nearest benefit concert — music raising awareness of hunger, a food drive at intermission. None of that is bad, exactly. But it isn’t the actual argument, and reaching for it too quickly would let this piece slide into the trap this whole series keeps having to climb back out of: treating music as a tool for something else, instead of something that already belongs, on its own terms, to the work.

So here’s the argument, made as plainly as I can make it: singing and eating aren’t just two nice things a culture does. They’re among the very few things nearly every culture does together, in the same room, on purpose — and they share more than a room. They share a body. Both require breath. Both require sustained physical effort from something as unglamorous as a diaphragm. A body that can’t sustain a long exhale can’t sustain a long phrase, whether that phrase is spoken, sung, or played. Hunger and music share more than a metaphor: the same muscle, doing two different jobs, and failing at both for the same reason.

Which means hunger’s exact mechanism — the body’s basic capacity to sustain breath and effort — is the medium the entire subject runs on, in a way it never quite is for a math class or a history lecture, where hunger only ever visits from outside. A fed body doesn’t become musical just because it ate. But an unfed body can’t become musical no matter how hard it tries, and that’s a different, more specific claim than “kids play better when they’re not hungry.” Every subject is easier when a kid isn’t hungry. Only a few subjects are, in the most literal sense, made of breathing.

So the music room is where a fed body gets to do something a hungry one can’t: turn survival into something offered, on purpose, to other people in the room, rather than where hunger itself gets solved. That’s what’s on the other side of hunger’s door once it opens, more than it’s music helping hunger — the reason the meal was worth serving in the first place.

What This Looks Like Monday Morning

None of this is useful yet. A loop is not a lesson plan, and recognition, left where it is, just becomes one more thing to feel briefly bad about before the day starts. So here’s the floor: seven things worth looking at differently, arranged from the smallest lever to the largest, not by which goal they belong to.

Know the program by name. Learn the name of your building’s breakfast or food program, specifically, and don’t assume the front office has already connected the kids who need it. You don’t run cafeteria logistics. But you can be one more adult in the building who knows the actual program by name and says its name out loud to a kid who needs to hear it.

Read fatigue as information. The student who’s suddenly withdrawn, who suddenly can’t hold a rehearsal’s attention — treat that as data before you treat it as a discipline problem. And know, ahead of time, who you actually call: a counselor’s name, a nurse’s office, not a vague sense that someone handles this.

Don’t assume “didn’t practice” means “didn’t care.” When an at-home assignment doesn’t happen, ask before you assume disengagement. A working outlet, a charged phone, a quiet lit room after dinner — none of it is guaranteed everywhere, and the kid who didn’t practice may be describing a household, not an attitude.

Ask, instead of only auditing. Rather than quietly reviewing your own program for who gets pushed to the front — section leaders, solos, first chairs — ask your students what they’ve noticed. They usually know before you do, and asking is itself a small return of the thing this whole series keeps arguing for: some real say in the room they’re in.

Notice the transportation math. For an early rehearsal, a before-school sectional, an after-school trip — consider whether attendance depends on a ride, a bus that actually comes, or a walk that’s safe to make. A schedule can quietly select for who’s able to show up, long before anyone calls it unfair.

Treat a fee like a rule, not just a cost. Pick one recurring cost in your program — an instrument rental, a trip fee, a uniform — and ask not just whether it’s expensive, but whether it’s a rule you actually have any power to change. Sometimes the honest answer is no. Sometimes it’s a waiver you’ve never actually been asked to offer.

Notice what your classroom already is. The routines, the safety, the same-time-every-day consistency you already run aren’t scaffolding around the real content. For a lot of kids, your room is one of the only functioning institutions in their week, whether you built it on purpose or not. Naming that, even just to yourself, changes what the room is for.

Only one of these is new work. The rest are things you’re already doing, just newly worth noticing.

Where the Loop Goes Next

None of this needed a benefit concert, only a name for something that was already happening, eight ways, in one loop, through one kid.

This piece closes out the society tier — all eight goals now have a home somewhere in this series, two of them, energy and community, walked for the first time right here. Next, the arc moves to the biosphere: water, climate, life on land and in the sea, the layer the whole cake is actually sitting on. But an ending shouldn’t spend its last breath previewing the next one. So here’s the question I’d actually like to leave you with, the one underneath all eight goals and both meals in this piece’s title:

What does the music make possible, between people who have just eaten together?

It’s a real question, worth asking on the way out of the cafeteria and into the room where the concert happens.

If any of this resonated — or if you think I am getting something wrong — I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into — something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on — please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing — even at the free level — helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities — linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett

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References

Alaimo, K., Olson, C. M., & Frongillo, E. A. (2001). Food insufficiency and American school-aged children’s cognitive, academic, and psychosocial development. Pediatrics, 108(1), 44–53.

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E., Lenton, T. M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H. J., Nykvist, B., de Wit, C. A., Hughes, T., van der Leeuw, S., Rodhe, H., Sörlin, S., Snyder, P. K., Costanza, R., Svedin, U., … Foley, J. (2009). Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2). https://doi.org/10/gd53h4

United Nations. (n.d.). Communications materials. Retrieved June 4, 2026, from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/

This one fought me the whole way. Not for lack of things to say about poverty and music, but because there were too many places to stand. I could write for the music teacher who wants to do something about poverty in their classroom by Monday. Or for the teacher educator who wants the broad strokes, or still needs convincing that poverty, music, and sustainability belong in the same sentence. There’s a version for the reader teaching about poverty, and a different one for the reader teaching through it, or in it, or for something past it. Those small prepositions quietly decide what a lesson is even for. Every one of them is a different article, and poverty is tangled enough that all of them felt urgent. In the end I decided to write from the one place I actually know, which is the room.

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There’s a deeper reason it resisted me, though, and it runs under this whole series, so it’s worth saying plainly. This work is stubbornly contextual. What lifts a barrier in one school does nothing in the school half a mile away, because the families aren’t the same, the budget isn’t the same, and the thing a given kid is missing isn’t the same. That’s the nature of the work rather than a defect in it. It also means I can’t hand you a lesson plan and call it finished; the plan that fit my old room could be useless in yours. What carries from one room to another isn’t the plan. It’s a way of seeing that lets you build your own.

I can write about this because I’ve stood in it. I’ve taught the students you’ll read about below. I’ve also made the phone calls a teacher hopes never to make, to Child Protective Services, more than once, over things that traced back one way or another to a family that didn’t have enough. I don’t mention that for effect. I mention it so you know that when I write about poverty in a classroom, I’m not reaching for a policy abstraction. I’m thinking about kids whose faces I still remember.

I should be equally honest about the edges of that view. I’m a white man in the United States, where poverty is real but often cushioned by things much of the world can’t assume: a school that at least owns a few instruments, some kind of floor beneath the worst of it. Poverty isn’t one thing. It’s lived one way in the communities I’ve taught in, another in the places some of the examples below come from, and another again where there’s no school to walk into at all. What I can offer is one honest angle on it. I can’t pretend it’s the only one, or that mine reaches the hardest edges.

I have taught students who couldn’t sing because they were too hungry to put enough breath behind a note. Students who wore the same clothes several days running. At the time I filed these under sympathy, a hard situation for that kid, and moved the lesson along, because the thing in front of me was a rehearsal and the thing behind their eyes was something I had no idea how to fix. It took me a long time to see what I was actually looking at. It wasn’t private misfortune happening near my classroom. It was poverty, sitting in the room, deciding who got to take part in the thing I was there to teach.

Poverty was in the room

We don’t usually call it that. We file it under logistics, or under the unfortunate, or under the way things are. And I’ve come to think the filing isn’t a personal failure so much as the profession’s habit. When the compendium Music as a Global Resource gathered more than a hundred music programs from around the world, many of them working with children pushed to the margins by poverty, it asked each program which of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals its work served (Hesser & Bartleet, 2020). Eight in ten named good health. Nearly six in ten named quality education. Only fifteen percent named No Poverty (Hesser & Bartleet, 2020). The work was nearly everywhere. The word for it was almost nowhere. That gap, between what we do and what we let ourselves call it, is the thing this piece is trying to close.

Last time, I argued that teachers sit far closer to the center of the world’s hardest problems than anyone tells them, because education is the lever most of the other work runs through. SDG 1, No Poverty, is where that argument meets its hardest test, and where the whole idea of sustainability shows its hand.

SDG 1 reads, in full, “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” (United Nations, 2015). It’s the first of the seventeen goals. The easy move is to picture it far away, in the regions where most extreme poverty still sits. But hold onto three of those words: in all its forms. Poverty isn’t only the global line the World Bank draws, raised in June 2025 to three dollars a day for the world’s low-income countries (World Bank, 2025). It’s also the closer thing the goal names when it asks each country to cut poverty by its own national definition (United Nations, 2015). By that measure, poverty was in my room. It was the kid too hungry to sing.

The loop

For years I missed the connection that turns this from a sad fact into a sustainability problem. Start with the hungry child in front of you. A hungry body can’t attend, can’t focus, can’t learn; that’s biology, not a discipline problem. The research bears it out: food insufficiency in childhood is linked to poorer cognitive, academic, and psychosocial outcomes (Alaimo, Olson, & Frongillo, 2001). A child who can’t learn well leaves school with fewer doors open, and fewer doors is a fair working definition of staying poor. A person kept poor raises their own children on the same thin margins, and those children walk into a classroom carrying the same hunger. The loop closes, and a society hands its poverty down to the next generation intact.

That loop is what sustainability is actually about. Take away the recycling bins and the solar panels and sustainability comes down to one promise: that we won’t hand the next generation a worse floor than we were given. Poverty is the clearest place that promise breaks, over and over, generation after generation. Education is one of the few forces that can interrupt it. So the hungry kid in your room and the future of a livable society turn out to sit on the same short chain. They were never separate problems. One is simply how the other reproduces itself.

Gates

Which means the music room is no bystander. It’s one of the places the sorting happens. Consider what it takes to fully belong in a strong program: the rental or the purchase, the reeds and strings that wear out, the trip, the summer camp, the years of private lessons that separate the kids who arrive “ahead” from the kids who arrive “behind.” Each of those is a small gate, and at every gate one kid is waved through while another turns around. This isn’t a guess about how it probably goes. When California audited arts access across its schools in 2016, it found that only 26% of students received arts education adequate to the state’s own education code, and that students at high-poverty schools were five times more likely to receive no arts education at all than students at wealthy ones (Arts Education Data Project, cited in Hesser & Bartleet, 2020). The country’s former education secretary, Arne Duncan, called the disparity “an equity issue and a civil rights issue” (cited in Hesser & Bartleet, 2020). Not a difference in quality. A difference in whether the thing exists for you. So the room doesn’t fight poverty from a distance, and it doesn’t only teach about it. It’s one of the places where economic belonging gets handed out or held back. And since a child who feels they belong to something is a child more likely to stay, it’s also one of the places the loop can be broken.

I’d rather name the uncomfortable part myself than have a sharper reader name it for me. Music education has been good at building those gates and calling them standards. Our ensembles skew, almost everywhere, toward the wealthier and the whiter. Our picture of “excellence” tends to reward the programs that were already well-resourced, and “rigor” can quietly mean “raised with the right kind of preparation.” No single teacher built this on purpose. It’s the water we all swim in, and the kids I filed under sympathy felt the current long before I did.

The fees aren’t villainy either. Most teachers charging them are holding a program together with no budget, in a district that treats music as the first thing to cut. If you charge for the rental because the alternative is no instruments at all, you’re not the problem. You’re doing triage in a system that should never have asked it of you. Naming a gate doesn’t blame the gatekeeper. It’s how you work out, clear-eyed, which gates you actually have the power to lower.

There’s a move that runs the other way, too, and here the goal’s own arithmetic is on our side. SDG 1 measures poverty the way most of us were taught to, in income, dollars per day. But sociologists have long argued that income is the shallow measure. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, in Black Wealth/White Wealth, showed that the deeper engine of inequality is wealth: not what a family earns in a year, but what it has managed to accumulate and pass on (Oliver & Shapiro, 1995). Inheritance, in a word. And inheritance should sound familiar by now, because it’s exactly what the loop runs on. Poverty persists by being handed down.

Tara Yosso, an education scholar working in the tradition of critical race theory, took that insight into the classroom and asked the question the deficit story never thinks to ask: what else do these families hand down? Her answer is what she named community cultural wealth, the assets that communities written off as poor keep transmitting anyway, one generation to the next (Yosso, 2005). Aspiration held against long odds. Language and story. And, named outright in her framework, music (Yosso, 2005). It might be the student who’s never read a note but carries every harmony from the music they grew up inside. It might be the family that can’t fund a trip but has kept a whole tradition alive through hard years.

This isn’t hypothetical. In Chennai, the NalandaWay Foundation runs a children’s choir drawn from some of the city’s poorest government and trust-run schools, selecting and training children marginalized by poverty, caste, and religion (Hesser & Bartleet, 2020). One of its leading singers is Mahalakshmi, the daughter of a mechanic named Sudhakar. “We belong to the Dalit community,” he explains. “We are a poor family. No one in my family knows anything about music. Now my daughter is pursuing music very well. That’s why I send her to the class” (quoted in Hesser & Bartleet, 2020). No one had to teach that family to value it. The wealth was already there. Someone finally counted it.

These kids aren’t empty vessels waiting for us to pour something in. They arrive already holding an inheritance in the very thing we teach. The room can confirm the deficit story or it can recognize the wealth that walked in, and that choice is ours to make. It costs nothing.

Which is why I won’t oversell it. Recognition is the cheap part, and seeing a child’s musical inheritance doesn’t buy the instrument or fill the stomach. You can honor everything a kid carries and they can still be too hungry to sing. Recognition without resources is half a loaf. The work asks for both hands: the free one that refuses the deficit story, and the costly one that lowers a gate.

And let me be straight about the ceiling on that costly hand, because you already know the movie. A dedicated music teacher walks into a poor school, hands a kid an instrument, and the strings swell as a life turns around. We’ve all absorbed some version of it, and it’s a lie shaped like a compliment. It flatters the teacher and it uses the child, casting one as savior and the other as a project to be rescued and made grateful. Worse, it tells us the opposite of the truth: that one caring adult with a trumpet is enough, so we needn’t trouble ourselves with the funding, or the rent, or the food. Nothing in a music room will lift a family out of poverty. The instrument you lend doesn’t pay the rent, and the belonging you offer doesn’t fill a stomach. If I told you otherwise, if I sold you the movie, you’d be right to stop reading. This matters, and it isn’t enough. Both things are true, and the work only stays honest if you hold them together.

What one teacher can do

That second hand is where it turns practical, and the scale is entirely yours. You don’t have to do all of it, and you shouldn’t take my list as the list, because I don’t know your room and you do. What follows isn’t a plan to copy. It’s a way of looking, and you’re the one who can judge what’s realistic and relevant where you stand. Start by seeing the gates at all. Walk your own program and add up what it costs, in money and gear and assumed head starts, to take full part, then notice who that price turns away. That noticing changes nothing yet, and it still counts, because you can’t lower a gate you can’t see. From there, lower one. A small library of school-owned instruments. A no-questions fund for the trip. A rule that nobody gets cut and nobody pays to play. A quiet word with the counselor about the kid whose hunger you now recognize for what it is. None of it singles a child out, because the point is to change the default, not to spotlight the one who can’t pay. And if you teach something other than music, run the same audit on your own room: the supply list, the field trip, the assignment that assumes a computer at home.

Some of the biggest gates aren’t yours to lower alone, and that’s worth saying to the people who can. Whether instruments get funded, whether the schedule forces a poor kid to choose music over a paying shift, whether there’s a bus at all; those decisions live at the level of the school and the district. If you lead one, this is your leverage point. What gets named in a budget gets protected, and arts access is worth naming.

It helps to picture the room where this goal is met, because it’s nearer than it sounds. You’d know it not by a statistic but by what’s gone from it. The kid who can finally get a full breath behind the note, because breakfast was a given and not a gamble. The trip nobody had to sit out. The word “talented” no longer doing quiet duty for “could afford lessons.” A section sorted by how badly the kids want to be there rather than by what their families could spend. None of that ends poverty everywhere. It ends poverty’s grip on one room, which is a smaller thing, and a thing a teacher can actually do.

That’s what I keep coming back to. Poverty isn’t only out there in the world, a problem for larger and more important people to solve. It moves in a loop, generation handing it to generation, and a classroom is one of the few places that loop can be broken. The loop runs on inheritance. So does the counterforce. You can’t undo what poverty does to a family. You can change what it’s allowed to do at your door, you can make sure the inheritance a child carries in gets counted as wealth and not as lack, and you can be one of the reasons a kid stays in the room long enough for the cycle to bend.

So the question I’ll leave you with is small, and it’s yours — though which version depends on where you stand. If you teach music: what does it cost to belong in your room, and what is one gate you could lower before this year is out? If you train the teachers: whose gates are you handing your students the eyes to see, and are you sending them out ready to spot the ones I took years to notice? And if you’re neither — if you’re simply someone who votes, pays taxes, and lives downstream of what schools do: the next time arts funding shows up on a ballot, a school board agenda, or a budget line somebody wants to cut, will you know it for what it is, and say so? Every gate I’ve described was built, and paid for, by choices someone made. You get a vote on some of them.

A note on where this series goes from here.

Rather than march through the goals one at a time, from one to seventeen, I’m going to take them in the groupings laid out by the “wedding cake” model of the SDGs, developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. That model stacks the seventeen goals into three tiers: a biosphere at the base (the living systems everything else depends on), a society resting on it, and an economy resting on that, with partnerships running up through the middle like a spine. It’s a useful picture because it refuses the usual flat list and insists on what sits inside what. Taking the goals in those clusters lets me follow the connective tissue between them instead of pretending each one stands alone, and, frankly, it’s a more efficient way to get through all seventeen without seventeen separate essays that keep repeating the same links.

So the next installment won’t be a lone goal but a cluster. I’ve been talking around hunger this whole piece, and Zero Hunger sits down in the biosphere tier, tangled up with the living systems that feed us. That’s where we’ll go next.

If any of this resonated — or if you think I am getting something wrong — I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into — something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on — please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing — even at the free level — helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities — linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett

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References

Alaimo, K., Olson, C. M., & Frongillo, E. A. (2001). Food insufficiency and American school-aged children’s cognitive, academic, and psychosocial development. Pediatrics, 108(1), 44–53.

Hesser, B., & Bartleet, B.-L. (2020). Music as a Global Resource: Solutions for Cultural, Social, Health, Educational, Environmental, and Economic Issues (5th ed.). Music as a Global Resource. https://www.musicasaglobalresource.org/

June 2025 Update to Global Poverty Lines. (n.d.). [Text/HTML]. World Bank. Retrieved July 5, 2026, from https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/factsheet/2025/06/05/june-2025-update-to-global-poverty-lines

Oliver, M., & Shapiro, T. (2013). Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203707425

United Nations. (n.d.). Communications materials. Retrieved June 4, 2026, from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/

UNDESA. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development | Department of Economic and Social Affairs. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006

A quick note before we begin. Last time, I said the next stop would be SDG 1 — No Poverty, and it still is; that piece is on its way. But while I was writing it, this essay kept insisting on going first. SDG 1 only lands if you already believe teachers hold real leverage over the future, and I realized I’d never quite made that case head-on. So think of this as the ground the rest of the series has been standing on all along. Then we’ll talk about poverty.

You are already doing sustainability work. You’re doing it in your classroom this week — probably today — and no one ever told you that’s what it’s called.

You care about the future: poverty, public health, the climate, the actual world your students will inherit. And somewhere underneath all that caring sits a small, heavy thought that closes the door. But I’m just a music teacher. What am I supposed to do about any of that from a room full of beginning trumpets? Maybe for you it isn’t trumpets but a math class, a kindergarten rug, a teacher-prep seminar. The instrument changes; the thought doesn’t. This essay is me telling you the door was never shut.

The problem was never that you don’t care. You already care — often more than the people who get to call their jobs “sustainability work” without anyone blinking. What you’re missing is sight: a clear line between what you do every day and the future you’re worried about. You can’t act on a possibility you can’t see. So this isn’t a guilt trip, and it isn’t a call to do more. It’s a flashlight.

The Map You Were Handed Is Wrong

Most of us carry a mental map without noticing we drew it. On one side stands everything we file under sustainability: scientists, engineers, policymakers, activists, the people at the big conferences with the lanyards. On the other side stands teaching: lesson plans, rehearsals, the seating chart, the spring concert. Two separate worlds, important work over there and ordinary work over here. The map tells you your work matters, but not in that way. The map is wrong.

I drew that map myself and believed it for years. How it fell apart is a longer story I’ve told elsewhere, but the short version is this: I went looking for the clean line between music and sustainability and never found it. Every thread I pulled was tied to three others. Eventually the failure became the point. I wasn’t discovering new connections between separate things; the separateness itself was the illusion, and the system had been whole the entire time. Nobody had handed me the picture.

Once you see the picture, the question stops being whether you belong in this work and becomes where. And the answer sits a lot closer to the center than anyone tends to tell you.

Education Isn’t a Goal. It’s How the Goals Happen.

Here’s what the map gets most wrong. Most professions act on the world — they build it, govern it, treat it, sell to it. Education works further upstream, on the people who grow up to do all of that. Every future voter, parent, engineer, neighbor, and council member passes through a classroom on the way to becoming themselves. Education is one of the main ways a society hands itself to the next generation, and one of the only ways it can become something other than what it has been. That’s not sentiment about teaching. It’s structure.

You can watch it surface in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the seventeen-part blueprint for a livable future that the sustainability world organizes itself around. Read down the list and notice its grammar. No poverty. Zero hunger. Good health. Clean water. Climate action. Almost every goal names an outcome — a place we’re trying to arrive. Education, Goal 4, sits there like one more destination. But it doesn’t behave like one. It’s the means by which most of the others become reachable at all. Lifting people out of poverty runs through it. Public health runs through it. Gender equity, decent work, the long turn toward a sustainable economy — each one depends, somewhere in its machinery, on whether and how people learn.

So education is miscategorized on its own list. It isn’t one goal among sixteen peers; it’s one of the engines the other sixteen run on. Which puts teachers — the people running that engine all day, across tens of millions of rooms — near the center of the entire project, not off to the side of it. Almost nobody ever tells them that.

Somebody Forgot to Brief You

Think about how strange that is. If education is one of the biggest levers a society has for changing its own future, you’d expect the people pulling the lever to have been briefed. You’d expect that somewhere in their training, someone sat them down and said: what you do in this room is one of the ways the future actually gets built. Here’s how it connects to everything you say you care about. Here’s the part of it that’s yours to shape.

That conversation almost never happens. Teachers get standards, pacing guides, assessment windows, duty rosters. What they don’t get is the picture — the one that shows where their daily, exhausting, ordinary work sits inside the machinery of how a society remakes itself. So they do the only reasonable thing a person can do without that picture: they assume the real work is happening somewhere else, in another building, by another kind of professional. They underestimate themselves out of an information gap, not modesty. The map they were handed left their own house off it, and this essay — along with the ones after it — exists to hand that missing piece back.

Your Most Important Work Is Invisible

There’s a second reason the truth stays hidden, and it’s baked into the job. The part of teaching you can see is small and immediate: tomorrow’s lesson, Friday’s concert, the grading stack, the kid in the third row who won’t stop talking. The part that matters most is slow, downstream, and almost entirely out of sight. You’ll rarely watch a student become the adult your teaching helped shape. No one sends word when a former student votes for the first time, holds a community together through a hard year, or raises their own kids a little differently because somewhere back in your room they learned they belonged to something.

You underestimate your influence because most of it lands in a place you’ll never get to stand and watch. Your deepest effects are real and invisible at the same time, which is a hard thing for any human being to hold onto. And here’s the lucky part: perception is the exact thing education already changes for a living.

You Don’t Need a New Program. You Need New Eyes.

This is usually where Education for Sustainable Development gets wheeled in as one more thing to do — a new framework, a new mandate, a new binder for an already overloaded week. It’s not that, and I’ve made the fuller case in an earlier piece. The short version is enough here. ESD adds nothing to your day; it changes what you notice while you do the work that’s already in front of you. It hands you a few questions. What larger system is producing what I’m seeing in this room? Who’s in it, and who isn’t? Where would one small move matter most? Then it lets you hold your ordinary teaching up to the light. Once you can see the leverage, what you do with it is entirely yours.

The Most Powerful Room in the Building

Let me come home to the music room, because this is where the abstraction stops being theory for me. The guide I trust most here is Donella Meadows. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, she was an environmental scientist and one of the first people to take systems thinking seriously as a way of understanding the whole planet. She was the lead author of The Limits to Growth, the 1972 study that modeled where unchecked growth on a finite world leads, and which went on to become one of the most widely read environmental books ever written. She spent her career on the largest version of the question this essay keeps circling: how does a system as big as an entire society actually change? Near the end of her life she distilled her answer into a short, now-famous list that ranks the places you can push on a system to move it, from the feeblest points to the most powerful.

Here’s why that list should matter to you. The weakest places, down at the bottom, are the knobs everyone reaches for first: budgets, numbers, rules. The most powerful, up at the top, is what she called the level of paradigm — the shared, mostly unspoken assumptions a culture holds about what’s normal, what’s possible, and who counts. Change those, and everything beneath them shifts on its own. Sit with what that means for a second. The woman who tried to model the entire planet’s future concluded that our deepest leverage isn’t in the halls of power or the size of a budget; it’s in the assumptions people absorb very young, about themselves and about one another. And those assumptions take shape in classrooms — including, in a particularly concentrated form, a music room.

I’ve written separately about the capacities a music classroom develops — the listening, the constant real-time adjustment, the carrying of one part inside a larger whole — so I won’t make the whole case again here. What matters now is what those capacities are underneath. A young person learns, in their body and long before they have words for it, that they belong to something larger than themselves and that the whole is counting on their part. That’s a paradigm-level lesson, an assumption about who counts and how a person fits into a group, taught at the exact altitude Meadows said matters most.

None of that is a contribution to sustainability work, off to the side of the real thing. It is the real thing — operating at the highest-leverage point in the whole system, in one of the few rooms where it still happens at scale. The question was never whether music education belongs to this work. It’s whether we notice it while it’s happening.

Three Seconds in Your Classroom

Let me make that concrete, because “operating at the paradigm level” sounds like homework right up until it lands on something real. Here’s a moment every teacher knows. A kid mutters, half to themselves, I’m not really a music person. On the surface it’s nothing — a shrug, a throwaway line, the bell about to ring. Underneath, a paradigm-level event just happened. A young person stated an assumption about who they are and who gets to count as musical, and what you do in the next three seconds will either confirm that verdict or start to overturn it. You were always answering. You just weren’t always choosing your answer on purpose.

Noticing that doesn’t saddle you with an obligation. It hands you a dial, and you decide how far to turn it. Turn it the smallest amount and you change nothing today — you just hear the moment for what it is, maybe for the first time, and let it land. That counts; awareness is where every other option starts. Turn it a little further and you answer that one kid differently — not with a pep talk, but with a single true sentence that puts the verdict back in play. Turn it further still and you start building a room where that sentence comes up less and less, noticing who’s in the ensemble and who wrote themselves off two years ago, and treating that as something you have a hand in rather than weather you simply receive.

None of these is the “right” amount, and the lens isn’t there to push you up the dial. It’s there so you can see the dial at all, and so you know the smallest turn still counts. If you don’t teach music, the move is identical. The science teacher is one question away from who in town has clean water and who doesn’t. The history teacher is one question away from whose story got told and whose got buried. You don’t bolt a sustainability lesson onto the real one; you realize the real one was already halfway there.

You Don’t Have to Save the World

The invitation here isn’t to save the world before lunch. You don’t have to take on all seventeen goals, fix the climate, become an activist, add a unit, or rebuild your curriculum by Monday. That version is just one more weight on a profession already carrying too many, and I won’t add to the pile. This is the rare offer that asks nothing extra of you: you get to matter more without doing more. The invitation is smaller and far more durable than a new project: one leverage point, one connection you can finally see, one ordinary thing you already do, done a little more on purpose. A sustainable future doesn’t get built only out of summits and breakthroughs. It gets built out of millions of people working a little more deliberately inside the lives and jobs that were already theirs.

Welcome to the Center of the Work

You were handed a profession that helps shape the world, and along the way you were handed a map with your own house left off it. Nobody did it on purpose — the system was just better at handing out pacing guides than perspective. Everything I’m writing here is an attempt to redraw that one corner: to put your house back where it always stood, and to let you see what your everyday work has been carrying into the future the whole time.

That’s the whole of it. I’m not asking you to become a sustainability specialist, or to add a single thing to your week. I’m offering you a truer picture of the work you already have, in case it changes what feels possible. Most readers start about where you might have started a few minutes ago: I care about all of this, but there’s no place for me in it. My one hope is that you finish somewhere different. Not assigned a new job — located in the one you already have, able to see where you stand and why it counts.

So here’s the one thing I’ll ask, and it’s a question, not an assignment. If you could see — really see — how your everyday teaching already shapes the future, what’s one thing you’d do a little more on purpose tomorrow?

Next time: SDG 1 — No Poverty, and why it’s one of the clearest places to watch the lever in this essay actually move.

If any of this resonated — or if you think I am getting something wrong — I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into — something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on — please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing — even at the free level — helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities — linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett

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Sources

Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. The Sustainability Institute. https://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf

Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W. (1972). Limits to Growth. https://collections.dartmouth.edu/xcdas-derivative/meadows/pdf/meadows_ltg-001.pdf?disposition=inline

On the surface, the decision looks practical. What fits the students’ range? What works for the concert? What can we learn before the end of the quarter? What will the audience enjoy? What does the budget allow? Anyone who has taught music knows those questions matter.

But underneath them sit larger questions that do not announce themselves as loudly. Whose music belongs here? What histories should students encounter? What kinds of musical knowledge count as legitimate? Is the goal a clean performance, a meaningful experience, a deeper understanding of culture, a stronger community, a more confident student — or some combination of all of these?

That is where a routine teaching decision becomes something bigger.

It becomes a question about quality.

In the last article, I introduced the Sustainable Development Goals and explained why I wanted to begin this series with SDG 4: Quality Education. Education is the goal that helps move the other goals. It shapes poverty, health, gender equality, climate action, democratic participation, peace, and nearly everything else the SDGs are trying to address.

But SDG 4 raises a harder question than it first appears to.

What counts as a quality education?

That sounds simple until we try to answer it.

What SDG 4 Actually Is

SDG 4 is the United Nations goal focused on ensuring “inclusive and equitable quality education” and promoting “lifelong learning opportunities for all.” That phrase is worth slowing down with, because every part of it matters.

“Inclusive” means education cannot only work for students who already fit the system well. “Equitable” means we have to pay attention to who is still being left out or underserved. “Quality” means access alone is not enough; what happens inside education matters. And “lifelong learning” means education does not end at graduation. People need opportunities to keep learning across their lives, especially in a world that keeps changing.

Put more simply, SDG 4 asks four connected questions.

Who gets to learn? Who is still being left out? What kind of education are people receiving? And do they have opportunities to keep learning throughout life?

That already makes SDG 4 broader than a slogan about “better schools.” It includes early childhood through higher education, literacy and numeracy, safe learning environments, qualified teachers, and access for people who have historically been excluded.

But for this series, and especially for anyone interested in sustainability, one target inside SDG 4 matters in a particular way.

That target is SDG 4.7.

Why SDG 4.7 Is the Hinge

Most people will never hear the phrase “SDG 4.7,” but it may be one of the most important targets in the entire framework for educators.

SDG 4.7 says learners should acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development. It names Education for Sustainable Development, sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, peace and nonviolence, global citizenship, cultural diversity, and appreciation of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

That is a lot to hold in one target. But the basic idea is this: education is not only about getting students through school. It is about preparing people to understand and participate in the world they are inheriting.

This is where SDG 4 becomes especially important for music educators.

SDG 4.7 explicitly names cultural diversity and culture’s contribution to sustainable development. That matters because music is not a decorative extra at the edge of education. Music carries culture, identity, memory, grief, protest, and belonging. When music teachers help students encounter those things with care, they are not stepping outside the purposes of education. They are working near the center of one of its deepest purposes.

This does not mean every music lesson needs to become a lesson about the United Nations. It does not mean every concert needs an SDG theme. It does not mean music teachers have to become sustainability experts overnight.

It means music education belongs in the conversation.

Where ESD Fits

Education for Sustainable Development, or ESD, is the approach most directly connected to SDG 4.7.

ESD is sometimes misunderstood as teaching about sustainability topics. That can be part of it, but it is not the whole thing. ESD is not only a lesson on climate change, recycling, or the SDGs. It is a way of teaching that helps learners understand complexity, imagine possible futures, reflect on values, collaborate with others, participate in communities, and make thoughtful decisions in situations where there may be no single right answer.

That is the part many educators may recognize, even if they have never used the phrase ESD.

Systems thinking. Futures thinking. Critical thinking. Collaboration. Participation. Cultural understanding. Values reflection. Learning to navigate uncertainty and disagreement. These are not small extras. They are the capacities people need in a world shaped by overlapping crises and difficult choices.

And this is where I want to be careful.

It would be easy to write about ESD in a way that makes teachers feel behind, as if sustainability education is one more initiative they have failed to implement. I do not think that is the right starting point. In many classrooms, the more honest one is this:

Teachers may already be closer to this work than they realize.

You May Already Be Closer Than You Think

Many good teachers already develop pieces of ESD simply by being thoughtful educators.

When a teacher helps students collaborate, listen across difference, ask better questions, revise their thinking, connect learning to real life, or contribute to a classroom community, that teacher may already be developing capacities that matter for sustainable development.

Music teachers do this constantly.

When students interpret a piece of music, they practice judgment. They make decisions when there is no single correct answer. They learn that expression requires responsibility, not just feeling.

When students learn music from a culture beyond their own, they encounter questions of history, identity, respect, and representation. Taught well, they learn that music does not appear out of nowhere. It comes from people, places, struggles, and communities.

When students compose, improvise, or arrange, they practice imagining something that does not yet exist. That matters more than we usually say. A sustainable future also requires imagination. Someone has to be able to picture a world that is not simply a repetition of the one we already have.

And when students perform for a community, they participate in cultural life. They experience music not as a product, but as a form of relationship.

None of this means every good music lesson is automatically ESD. Alignment is not automatic. A teacher can treat cultural diversity superficially. A group project can reproduce unequal participation. A performance can feature “global music” without helping students understand the people or contexts behind it. Creativity can be reduced to decoration. Collaboration can become compliance.

That is why intentionality matters.

The point is not that teachers are already doing everything. The point is that many teachers are already standing near the doorway.

Why Language Matters

So if many teachers are already doing pieces of this work, why should they care about SDG 4, SDG 4.7, or ESD at all?

Because language matters.

We cannot intentionally strengthen what we cannot clearly see. When teachers have language for what they are developing, they can recognize it, assess it, defend it, and extend it.

Without that language, some of the most important parts of teaching stay invisible. A music teacher may know that ensemble participation helps students listen, cooperate, persist, and belong. But in a school system that mostly rewards what can be counted quickly, those outcomes can sound soft, secondary, or hard to justify.

SDG 4.7 gives us another way to speak. It says cultural understanding, global citizenship, peace, sustainability, and participation are not ornamental. They are part of what quality education is supposed to include.

For general teachers, this connects everyday practice to a larger purpose. Helping students think critically, work together, understand other perspectives, and connect learning to the world is not a distraction from education. It is part of the work education is being asked to do.

For music teachers, it matters because arts programs are so often asked to justify themselves in narrow terms. We are asked to prove that music improves test scores, attendance, graduation rates, or social-emotional skills. Those arguments can be useful, but they are incomplete. Music matters not only because it supports other outcomes. Music matters because culture matters. Expression matters. Shared meaning matters. Human beings do not live by measurable outputs alone.

For teacher educators, this matters because future teachers need more than methods. They need preparation for complexity: practice examining values, designing meaningful learning, engaging culture respectfully, and helping students connect content to the world they inhabit.

For policymakers, it matters because what gets named often gets protected. If quality education is reduced to what is easiest to measure, the curriculum narrows. Arts programs become vulnerable. Teacher preparation becomes technical. Students may receive schooling that is efficient without being humane, measurable without being meaningful, and rigorous without being relevant to the future they will actually face.

And if you are not an educator, this still matters, because every public problem eventually becomes an educational problem. Poverty is shaped by education. Health is shaped by education. Democracy is shaped by education. Climate action is shaped by education. Peace is shaped by education. The ability to tell truth from manipulation, to listen across difference, to understand history, to imagine alternatives, and to participate in community life does not appear automatically. It has to be learned, practiced, and protected.

That is why SDG 4 belongs to everyone.

The Hard Word: Quality

The phrase “quality education” sounds reassuring because almost no one is against it.

But quality is not self-defining.

Some people define it through test scores, graduation rates, workforce readiness, efficiency, or measurable achievement. Others define it through creativity, belonging, cultural understanding, critical thinking, democratic participation, well-being, or the ability to live responsibly with others.

Those are not merely technical differences. They are value differences.

Music education makes the tension easy to see. Is a quality music program one that earns superior ratings at festival? One that develops strong technical skill? One that includes the largest number of students? One that honors local culture? One that teaches students to read notation fluently? One that helps them compose, improvise, and create? One that builds community? One that introduces students to music they would never otherwise encounter? One that helps them understand themselves and others?

The honest answer may be yes — but not always equally, and not without tradeoffs.

Every choice gives something priority. Rehearsing for a polished concert may build discipline, focus, and ensemble excellence, but it may leave less room for student composition or cultural inquiry. Centering student choice may deepen ownership, but it asks teachers to share control in ways that feel less predictable. Teaching music from many traditions may expand students’ understanding, but done carelessly, it can flatten those traditions into samples.

This is why quality cannot be treated as neutral. Every definition of quality carries a vision of what education is for.

That does not mean all answers are equally good. It means we have to be honest that we are making choices.

Who Gets to Decide?

Once we admit that quality is value-laden, the next question becomes unavoidable.

Who gets to decide what counts?

The answer is complicated. Policymakers decide through laws, funding, standards, and accountability systems. Institutions decide through teacher preparation, accreditation, curriculum, and assessment. Administrators decide through schedules, staffing, evaluation, and program priorities. Teachers decide through daily practice. Students and communities should have a voice, though they often hold the least formal authority.

And sometimes the answer becomes painfully concrete.

In a 2023 report on divisive-concepts laws and music education, one Tennessee music educator described rethinking the use of certain African American spirituals because discussions connected to those songs might be “misconstrued to violate the law.” That example matters because it shows how quickly an abstract policy debate becomes a repertoire decision. A law written far from the music room can still shape what a teacher feels safe enough to teach.

But you cannot teach spirituals honestly without teaching something about the conditions that produced them. You cannot teach jazz honestly without teaching something about race, migration, improvisation, exploitation, brilliance, and American history. You cannot teach protest music honestly while pretending power has nothing to do with it.

When political pressure makes teachers afraid to teach the meanings inside music, it does not merely limit context. It changes what music education is allowed to be.

That is why SDG 4.7 matters. It insists that culture, peace, human rights, global citizenship, and diversity are not decorations around education. They are part of what quality education is supposed to include.

One Place to Begin

So what should we actually do?

I do not think the first step is to redesign everything. For most teachers that would be unrealistic, and frankly unnecessary. A better first step is to notice what is already alive in your teaching and ask one question:

What capacity for a sustainable future might this learning experience help students develop?

A rehearsal might develop listening and interdependence. A composition project might develop imagination and futures thinking. A discussion of a song’s history might develop cultural understanding. A community performance might develop participation and belonging. A repertoire choice might reveal whose voices are present, whose are missing, and why that matters. A classroom disagreement might become practice in democratic life.

The first step is not to force the SDGs onto every lesson. It is to recognize that teaching already carries these possibilities. Then we can name them. Then we can strengthen them. Then we can ask what is missing.

That is where SDG 4 becomes less like a distant UN goal and more like a mirror held up to the classroom.

What SDG 4 Asks of Us

SDG 4 is about access, equity, quality, and lifelong learning. SDG 4.7 adds something more specific and, in some ways, more demanding: education should help people understand sustainable development, human rights, peace, global citizenship, cultural diversity, and culture’s contribution to a sustainable future.

That is a large charge. But it does not begin somewhere far away, in a UN office or a policy document. It begins wherever teaching already happens: in classrooms, rehearsal rooms, community centers, libraries, and conversations about what young people deserve to learn.

The goal is not to become a different kind of teacher overnight.

The goal is to see more clearly what good teaching is already trying to do — and then do it with more intention, more courage, and a wider sense of what the work is for.

That still leaves us with the word that started the whole problem.

Quality.

SDG 4 does not hand us one final definition of quality education. It asks us to keep examining what quality should mean in the world our students are inheriting. It asks us to notice who has access, who is excluded, what is being taught, what is being measured, what is being ignored, and what kind of future our classrooms are quietly preparing students to accept — or to imagine differently.

And that brings us to the next goal.

Because if education is the lever that helps the other goals move, then SDG 1 — No Poverty — is one of the clearest places to see why that lever matters. Poverty shapes who gets access to education, what resources schools have, whether children arrive ready to learn, whether arts programs survive, and what futures students are encouraged to believe are available to them.

If any of this resonated — or if you think I am getting something wrong — I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into — something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on — please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing — even at the free level — helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities — linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett

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Sources

Bartlett, K. C. (2025). Education for Sustainable Development in K–12 Music Education: A Survey Study of Teacher Perspectives and Practices in the Southwestern United States [ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3281118753?pq-origsite=primo&accountid=4485

Hess, J. (2019). Music education for social change: Constructing an activist music education. Routledge.

Kioupi, V., & Voulvoulis, N. (2019). Education for Sustainable Development: A Systemic Framework for Connecting the SDGs to Educational Outcomes. Sustainability. https://doi.org/10/gjmzx7

Laurie, R., Nonoyama-Tarumi, Y., Mckeown, R., & Hopkins, C. (2016). Contributions of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) to Quality Education: A Synthesis of Research. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 10(2), 226–242. https://doi.org/10/gmfp42

Richerme, L. K. (2025). Educating Ungrounded Values: Interrogating Political Versus Academic Epistemologies in Music Teacher Education. Journal of Research in Music Education, 73(3), 265–280. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224294241303840

Salvador, K., Abramo, J., Bernard, C. F., Bohn, A., Confredo, D. A., Cuthbertson, A., Consulting, A. C., Deemer, R., Dilworth, R., Hall, S. N., Helton, B. C., Martin, A., McBride, N. R., McKoy, C. L., Menon, S., Sánchez, L., Sauerland, W. R., Shaw, R. D., & Weigand, S. (2023). Divisive Concepts Laws and Music Education. NAfME.

UNESCO. (2024, October 23). Education for sustainable development: What you need to know | UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/sustainable-development/education/need-know

United Nations. (n.d.). Communications materials. Retrieved June 4, 2026, from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (n.d.). Goal 4 | Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved June 4, 2026, from https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4#targets_and_indicators

Varkøy, Ø., & Rinholm, H. (2020). Focusing on Slowness and Resistance: A Contribution to Sustainable Development in Music Education. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 28(2), 168–185. https://doi.org/10/gqr8mt

“I would like to understand better the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and how those goals can be tied back to education.”

It struck me, because I realized I had spent months writing around the Sustainable Development Goals without ever really introducing them. I had assumed people knew what they were. Most don’t — and honestly, I didn’t either for much of my teaching career.

Like many educators, I had seen the colorful icons. They showed up on conference slides, posters, websites, and the occasional professional development packet. But seeing them and understanding them are two very different things. No one ever sat me down and explained what they were, how they fit together, or why they might matter to someone teaching music. I had to go looking on my own. This is the explanation I wish someone had handed me years ago.

In 2015, all 193 member states of the United Nations agreed to seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, commonly called the SDGs. Together they describe what a better future might look like: ending extreme poverty, improving health, expanding access to education, advancing gender equality, protecting ecosystems, addressing climate change, strengthening peaceful societies. They are not laws and they are not mandates. They are a shared framework for thinking about the future we say we want to build.

But to understand the SDGs, it helps to see where they sit inside a much larger picture.

Sustainability, sustainable development, the SDGs, and ESD

These four terms are closely related, but they are not the same thing.

Sustainability is the goal. It describes a condition in which environmental health, social well-being, and economic prosperity can hold together over time. It answers the question: what are we ultimately trying to achieve?

Sustainable development is the pathway. It refers to the decisions, policies, and actions that move societies toward that destination. It answers: how do we get there?

The SDGs are the blueprint. The seventeen goals — and the 169 targets beneath them — lay out a shared picture of what progress looks like, identifying the major challenges humanity has to address to move toward a more sustainable future.

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is the toolkit. It is the teaching and learning that helps people understand complex challenges, imagine alternative futures, and develop the knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions needed to help create them.

Notice the name. The SDGs are the “SD” in “ESD.” The education is for sustainable development. So sustainability is the destination, sustainable development is the journey, the SDGs are the map, and ESD is how we learn to read it.

And because the goals are interconnected, you cannot meaningfully solve one by ignoring the others. Progress in education affects health. Health affects poverty. Poverty affects environmental outcomes. Those outcomes affect everything else. That interconnectedness matters more than it first appears — which is exactly why knowing the goals, and choosing to work toward them, is not a passive act. The framework only has force if enough people understand it well enough to defend it.

The honest part about 2030

The numbers are what they are.

Globally, only about 17% of SDG targets are on track, and more than a third have stalled or are sliding backward, according to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024. Progress on many measures slowed during the pandemic and has been further strained by conflict, displacement, economic instability, and mounting environmental pressure. The education figures alone are hard to sit with: UNESCO’s 2024 Global Education Monitoring Report finds that 251 million children and young people remain out of school worldwide, more than half of them in sub-Saharan Africa — a number that has fallen by only about 1% in nearly a decade. The annual funding gap for lower-income countries to reach their education targets runs to roughly $97 billion, and the world is short some 44 million teachers. The deadline is now less than five years away.

But the numbers don’t capture everything working against the goals, because education is among the first casualties of the forces reshaping global politics right now. Wars displace children and turn schools into rubble or shelter. In some countries, girls have been barred from classrooms outright — a political decision about who is permitted to learn at all. Disinformation erodes the shared facts that education depends on, turning subjects like climate science into a battleground rather than a body of knowledge to be taught. When rights contract, education contracts with them. None of this is incidental to SDG 4. It is the headwind the goal is now moving against, and it is why understanding the goals is not the same as assuming someone else will protect them.

So what do you do when you know you will miss a deadline? One response is to scale back the ambition — to quietly lower expectations. A group of researchers writing in Nature in 2024 argued for the opposite. Because the challenges the SDGs represent are so deeply interconnected, addressing fewer of them doesn’t actually make the problem smaller; it just leaves the hardest knots untouched. Their proposal was to extend the framework to 2050, with major checkpoints along the way.

I find that persuasive. The year 2030 was never really a finish line — it is a progress report. The point was never to “complete” sustainability by a particular date, but to begin building the habits, institutions, and systems capable of supporting a more sustainable future over generations. Urgency is real, and systems change is slow. Both are true at the same time, and one does not cancel out the other.

So why is a music teacher writing about this?

Some of the connections are obvious. SDG 4, Quality Education, belongs to every educator by definition, and SDG 4.7 — which explicitly names cultural diversity and sustainability — feels especially close to music education. Others take more work to see: the link between community music and peacebuilding, say, or between learning another culture’s music and understanding sustainability, or between composing a piece and the act of imagining a future that doesn’t yet exist. Those connections need more explanation, and I’ll build them over the course of this series.

But the reason I’m writing it is simpler than any single goal. If you teach music — in a classroom, a studio, a rehearsal hall, or a university methods course — you spend your days in sustained contact with the next generation. You help shape how people learn to listen, collaborate, express themselves, and take part in communities larger than themselves. That matters. Not because music teachers are uniquely virtuous, and not because the arts can solve every problem, but because every one of the goals ultimately depends on people learning how to live together — and education is where much of that learning happens.

For everyone who teaches

Education is the lever that helps the other goals move. It reduces poverty, improves health outcomes, supports gender equality, strengthens democratic participation, and contributes to more peaceful and resilient societies. This isn’t merely an inspirational claim; it’s one of the core assumptions built into the SDG framework itself. The United Nations describes SDG 4 as having a catalytic effect across the whole agenda, because progress in education tends to pull progress along elsewhere.

Which is sobering, because roughly two-thirds of countries with available data have made little or no progress toward their education targets. Millions of children remain out of school, and many who are enrolled struggle to reach basic literacy benchmarks. For educators, none of this is abstract. It shows up as overcrowded classrooms, shrinking budgets, staffing shortages, and programs that vanish the moment funding dries up. The battles teachers fight locally are not separate from these global challenges — they are the same challenges seen at a different scale.

For music teachers in particular

SDG 4.7 is a target most people never notice. It commits the international community to education that promotes global citizenship, cultural understanding, and an appreciation of cultural diversity — including, in its own words, an appreciation of “culture’s contribution to sustainable development.”

That language matters, because it means culture is not an optional decoration at the edges of education. It is part of how a quality education is defined. When music teachers introduce students to traditions beyond their own, they aren’t merely adding variety; when they help students understand how music carries history, identity, community, and place, they are doing exactly the kind of learning SDG 4.7 calls for.

There is also a more practical argument. Music programs are often among the first things cut in under-resourced schools, especially those serving low-income communities. Yet the evidence consistently points the same direction: access to music education is associated with stronger attendance, higher graduation rates, deeper engagement, and real social-emotional benefits. The point isn’t that music education alone solves educational inequality. It’s that when these programs disappear, something valuable disappears with them — and the loss reaches well past music itself.

The harder half: developing our ESD skills

Everything I’ve written so far is the comfortable half of the argument. It’s reassuring to notice the places where music education already overlaps with the SDGs. But that’s only half the story.

Music teachers spend years developing their musical chops. We study repertoire, learn rehearsal strategies, refine our conducting and assessment, and work hard at the craft of teaching. Education for Sustainable Development deserves the same seriousness. Sensing that music already brushes up against these ideas does not automatically make someone skilled at teaching them. Understanding that cultural diversity matters does not automatically prepare someone to facilitate honest conversations about sustainability, equity, uncertainty, or the future.

ESD is its own craft. Systems thinking is a skill. Futures thinking is a skill. Helping students navigate complexity, disagreement, and collective action is a skill. All of them can be learned — and most of us were never formally trained in any of them. I certainly wasn’t. Much of what I know about ESD came from following citations, reading reports, attending conferences, and feeling lost more often than I care to admit.

And this isn’t simply an individual challenge; it’s a structural one. Many curricula still devote little attention to sustainability education, climate change remains absent from large stretches of secondary schooling worldwide, and teacher preparation programs vary widely in whether they address sustainability at all. So if we believe sustainability matters, developing this fluency can’t stop at lesson design. It also means tending to the conditions that make the work possible in the first place — curricula, teacher preparation, funding, public policy. The lesson plan and the policy are the same project seen at different scales.

Music teachers need to build this capacity. So do educators generally, and so does anyone who cares about the place where education and sustainability meet. I’m still building mine. That’s part of why I’m writing this series at all.

Beneath the surface

Look closely at what music educators do, and many of the goals are already in the room.

At the surface, it looks like teaching students to play. Beneath that, it’s teaching them how to make choices when there’s no single right answer — how to interpret, revise, and decide, then sit with the result and try again. That is the kind of judgment every complex problem eventually demands.

Beneath that, it becomes a question of access and equity. Who can afford an instrument? Whose musical traditions get treated as central, and whose as enrichment? Whose programs are protected when budgets shrink? Those aren’t merely musical questions. They are questions about opportunity, participation, and belonging.

And underneath all of it is something music uniquely offers: it helps people connect, imagine, grieve, celebrate, and hope. Set against the scale of the challenges the SDGs describe, those capacities are not decorative — they are structural. Composition is future-oriented thinking. Community music is democratic rehearsal. Music educators have been doing versions of sustainability education for a very long time. The challenge now is to do it more intentionally, more thoughtfully, and more skillfully.

Why I’m starting with number four

Goal 4 is Quality Education. It’s home base — the goal most directly tied to what educators do every day, and the one many researchers consider foundational to progress across the rest of the framework.

But it also raises questions that are harder than they first appear. What counts as a quality education? Who gets access to it? Who decides what is worth teaching? What does a school owe the young people it is preparing for a future they will inherit? Before we talk about poverty, health, climate change, gender equality, or peace, it’s worth sitting with those questions first.

Because if education really is the goal that helps the others move, then the question beneath SDG 4 isn’t simply how we teach. It is what kind of future we are teaching toward.

This series began because a reader asked a question, and I’m grateful they did. If there’s an SDG you’d like me to reach sooner, or a connection you think I’m missing, let me know. Those conversations genuinely shape what comes next.

Next: SDG 4 — Quality Education. What does it actually mean to teach music well, and who gets to decide?

If any of this resonated — or if you think I am getting something wrong — I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into — something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on — please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing — even at the free level — helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities — linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett

Sources

• United Nations. (2024). The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024. (17% of targets on track; over one-third stalled or regressing.)

• UNESCO. (2024). Global Education Monitoring Report 2024: Monitoring SDG 4. (251 million children and youth out of school; ~1% decline in nearly a decade; over half in sub-Saharan Africa.)

• UNESCO & World Bank. (2024). Education Finance Watch 2024. (≈$97 billion annual funding gap for low- and lower-middle-income countries.)

• UNESCO. (2024). Transforming Education Towards SDG 4. (≈44 million teacher shortage worldwide.)

• Fuso Nerini, F., et al. (2024). Extending the Sustainable Development Goals to 2050 — a road map. Nature, 630, 555–562.

You see the finished piece.

You do not see the hour I spent staring at a blank document wondering whether to write about competency-based education, planetary boundaries, or why most sustainability frameworks quietly assume a level of institutional trust that no longer exists in many communities.

You do not see the notes I abandoned, the angles I started and discarded, or the moment I realized that the article I thought I was writing was actually three separate articles pretending to be one.

What you see is the translation. What I want to show you today is the original mess.

I Write Because I Think It Matters

Let me start with the obvious question: why bother at all?

I am not writing because I have run out of things to do. I am writing because I believe the challenges facing education, sustainability, and the future genuinely matter — and because I think the distance between important ideas and the people who could use them is one of the more quietly serious problems of our time.

Part of why this feels urgent to me: the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — 17 interconnected targets covering everything from climate action to quality education to reduced inequality, with a 2030 deadline the world set for itself — are significantly behind where they need to be. That gap between commitment and delivery is not abstract to me. It is the reason I write with some frequency and some urgency.

That distance is what I am trying to close.

The role I have gradually taken on — or perhaps accepted — is that of a translator. Not an expert handing down conclusions. Not a journalist chasing the news cycle. Something closer to a person who has spent considerable time in one room, learned the language spoken there, and now wants to carry some of that language into other rooms where it might actually do something.

The problem is that translation is genuinely hard.

The Complexity Problem

Sustainability is not a topic. It is a neighborhood of topics, and every street connects to every other street.

Climate connects to agriculture connects to migration connects to governance connects to education connects to equity connects to economics connects to health. Write about one and you are implicitly writing about all of them. Leave out the connections and the article feels thin. Include them and it becomes a graduate seminar.

Education for Sustainable Development — ESD, in the field’s shorthand — makes this worse, not better. Most people who encounter the phrase assume it means teaching children to recycle or showing students a documentary about coral reefs. The actual field is far broader: it includes helping students map how local decisions connect to global systems, build the capacity to imagine genuinely different futures, and develop the values and skills to participate in shaping them. It is part curriculum, part pedagogy, part philosophy. It is vast. It is contested. It is genuinely important.

And the deeper my understanding becomes, the harder it sometimes is to write a clean 1,200-word piece about any of it.

This is the paradox of expertise: it does not make things simpler. It reveals how many asterisks belong next to every confident statement. The challenge is not ignorance. The challenge is compression — deciding what to include, what to leave out, and whether what remains is still true.

The Audience Problem

Before I write a single sentence, I face a question I cannot fully answer: who is this for?

Teachers want to know what to do on Monday. Researchers want conceptual precision. Sustainability professionals want evidence and application. General readers want relevance and a reason to keep reading. Policymakers, when they read at all, want something they can use in a meeting.

These are not the same people. They are not reading for the same reasons. They do not share the same vocabulary, the same context, or the same tolerance for abstraction.

Every article I write implicitly chooses some of these readers over others. There is no universal entry point. There is no sentence that simultaneously satisfies the teacher looking for a lesson plan and the researcher tracking shifts in SDG implementation frameworks.

When I am stuck between audiences, my working heuristic is to ask: who has the least access to this idea and the most to gain from it? That question usually points me toward the teacher or the curious general reader rather than the specialist — not because specialists don’t matter, but because they already have access to the ideas through other channels.

This is not a complaint. It is a constraint I have learned to work within rather than around. Choosing an audience is not the same as excluding everyone else. It means deciding whose questions get centered — and being honest with myself that this is always a choice.

The Values Question

I have values. They shape what I write about, how I frame it, and what I think is at stake.

I should be transparent about what that means in practice. I align with liberal and left-leaning policy positions. I am not a neutral observer of sustainability debates — I am an advocate and an activist who believes the SDGs represent a genuine moral commitment that has been significantly underdelivered. Globally, progress on poverty, biodiversity, and climate targets has fallen well short of what was promised in 2015.

I am also a white, straight, college-educated man writing primarily from within Western educational frameworks — which means I carry both access and blind spots that are worth naming. My ethical orientation is humanist and atheist: I ground my concern for sustainability not in religious tradition but in a commitment to human dignity, intergenerational responsibility, and the intrinsic value of the living world. I hold a PhD in education, and I am currently working as an independent scholar — unaffiliated with any institution — which means I have no employer shaping what I am allowed to say or incentivizing particular conclusions. That is a kind of freedom I try not to waste.

I believe education is more than preparation for the labor market — it is one of the primary mechanisms through which societies decide what kind of future they are willing to imagine and work toward. I believe urgency is real. I believe systems change is slow. And I believe these two facts have to coexist in the same mind without one canceling out the other.

How explicitly should those convictions appear on the page?

This is a question I return to constantly. Strong convictions attract some readers and alienate others. Writing that feels like advocacy can close the door on people who might otherwise have walked through it. But writing that performs neutrality it doesn’t actually feel can become a kind of dishonesty — a way of hiding behind balance to avoid saying what you actually think.

I have not fully resolved this. My working position is to be clear about what I believe while remaining genuinely curious about where I might be wrong — and to communicate urgency without manufacturing despair. In practice, that means I try to show my reasoning rather than just my conclusions, so readers can follow the thinking and push back on it if they want to.

What Graduate School Did and Did Not Teach Me

My academic training taught me to write for committees, peer reviewers, and dissertation advisors. It taught me rigor, citation, hedging, and the protective coloration of passive voice.

It did not teach me to write for people who have no professional obligation to keep reading.

Public writing operates on entirely different physics. Readers are not captive audiences. They are not grading you. They owe you nothing. Every paragraph has to justify its own existence. Clarity is not a stylistic preference — it is the basic condition under which communication can occur.

Learning to write publicly has meant unlearning a significant amount of what graduate school rewarded. Shorter sentences. Earlier payoffs. Less scaffolding before the point. More willingness to say what I actually mean in the first paragraph rather than building to it across several pages of literature review.

It has also meant accepting that writing is part of thinking, not merely reporting conclusions I have already reached. Some of my clearest ideas emerged during the writing rather than before it. Some articles I thought were finished turned out to be first drafts of something I did not yet understand.

Why Translation Matters to Me Personally

I came to Education for Sustainable Development largely on my own. My doctoral committee did not specialize in ESD or the Sustainable Development Goals. The field was not a road I was walked down — it was terrain I navigated by reading widely, following citations, and occasionally feeling completely lost.

I remember what it felt like to encounter important ideas without a guide. To sense that something mattered without knowing how the pieces fit together. To wish that someone had laid out a clearer map earlier.

That experience is the engine behind what I do now. I want to be the writer I would have found useful when I was trying to understand these ideas for the first time. Not a simplifier. Not someone who strips away the difficulty to make it more palatable. A translator — someone who has done enough work with the material to know where the entry points are and can help others find them.

The Question Behind Every Article

Every piece I write is ultimately an attempt to navigate the same recurring tension: How do you communicate complexity and urgency to people with varying levels of context, limited time, and no particular obligation to care?

There is no formula. There is only the recurring exercise of asking: What does this reader actually need? What is the minimum context required for this idea to land? What am I assuming they already know that they might not? What am I leaving out because it complicates my argument, and should I be leaving it out?

And underneath all of that: Is this worth their time?

That question keeps me honest in a way that nothing else does. Because the honest answer is sometimes no — not yet, not this version, not this framing. And the only useful response to that answer is to revise.

Why I Keep Writing

The 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals is not a technicality. It is a marker of how seriously — or not seriously — the world has addressed commitments it made to itself.

Educational transformation is slow. Systems change is slow. Public understanding of why any of this matters is slow.

Writing is not going to accelerate that meaningfully on its own. I hold no illusions about the reach of a Substack essay relative to the scale of the problems I write about.

But ideas become more useful when they circulate. Understanding compounds when it is shared. And the alternative — keeping the translation work inside specialist communities where it can be precise but inaccessible — does not seem better.

I am doing this work without institutional affiliation at the moment — which clarifies the motivation considerably. Nobody is requiring this. There is no department expecting output, no grant funding the hours, no committee waiting on results. I write because I think it matters. That turns out to be enough.

So I keep writing. Not because I have everything figured out, and not from a position of neutrality. But because I believe these conversations are too important to leave only to the people who are already having them — and because I would rather be imperfectly present in the work than perfectly absent from it.

If any of this resonated — or if you think I am getting something wrong — I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into — something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on — please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.

If you are finding value here, subscribing — even at the free level — helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.

Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.

I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities — linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett.

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Share Teaching for a Complex World

I have a PhD. I am a teacher. I work in Education for Sustainable Development and music education — which means I spend my professional life thinking about how people learn, how systems fail, and how schools can prepare students for a world in active crisis.

So why can’t I find work?

That question sounds personal. Maybe embarrassing. It triggers the usual checklist: Is my resume optimized? Is my LinkedIn headline sharp enough? Do I need to network more, tailor more, translate myself better — be less academic, more “industry-ready”?

There is always another version of yourself you’re supposed to become before the door opens.

I’ve tried most of them. Nothing has opened.

At some point, the question changes. It stops being what am I doing wrong? and becomes what kind of system makes this feel normal?

What I’m experiencing isn’t unique to me, even though it feels that way.

People are applying into silence. Postings appear, disappear, and repost for months. Positions are listed as open while no one is actively hiring. Algorithms filter candidates before a human ever reads their materials. Networking conversations produce sympathy — but rarely a door.

The loneliness makes it feel like private failure. The pattern suggests something structural.

Look closer and you’ll see it: at the surface, one person, one inbox, one unanswered application. Beneath that, a recurring mismatch — the same non-response across industries, roles, and formats. Beneath that, the actual infrastructure: how hiring systems categorize expertise, how job descriptions are written, what gets recognized and what gets screened out before anyone has a conversation.

And underneath all of it, load-bearing and mostly invisible, is an assumption: that the labor market is basically rational, and that if you’re not finding work, something must be wrong with you.

That assumption is doing enormous work right now. I’m not sure it deserves the trust we’ve placed in it.

Here is what I know about the world I was trained to serve.

Institutions say they need sustainability. They say they need systems thinkers, knowledge translators, people who can bridge research and practice. International education frameworks explicitly call for these capacities. The UN’s own goals for decent work frame full, productive employment as a sustainability imperative.

Then someone like me shows up.

And the doors don’t open.

Part of the problem is that organizations are good at declaring what they need and poor at building the pathways to hire for it. Education for Sustainable Development doesn’t fail because the frameworks don’t exist — there are too many frameworks. The problem is abundance without coherence: sustainability shows up in the mission statement but not in the job description. Systems thinking gets praised in the interview and screened out by automated software before anyone reads your application.

What gets filtered is exactly the integrative, translational work that makes complex problems usable.

I am a music educator. And music education — actual music education, in an ensemble room, in a community choir, in a soundscape composition class — is one of the most powerful sustainability development tools we already have in schools. Not despite being “just music.” Because of what music education actually does.

Ensemble playing is systems thinking made embodied. You listen, you adapt, you calibrate your contribution to a shared whole — which is exactly what ecological and social systems require. Composition builds future orientation. Community music is democratic rehearsal. Soundscape work opens students to ecological listening in ways no textbook can replicate.

Music teachers are already doing sustainability education. They just aren’t calling it that — and neither are the institutions that fund them.

The educational foundation is already there. The language is missing. And without the language, it doesn’t get funded, connected, or recognized as the serious work it is. That’s not a music problem. It’s an institutional legibility problem. And it’s the same problem I run into every time I try to describe what I do.

Here is what I actually do — concretely, specifically, in the real world.

I have designed curriculum that helps teenagers understand climate justice through the music they already love. I have sat with rooms full of skeptical educators and watched them realize, sometimes for the first time, that their music program was already teaching systems thinking — they just hadn’t had the language to say so. I have helped adults in professional development settings see that the reason sustainability initiatives fail isn’t a funding problem. It’s a learning design problem. And I have done all of this as a public servant: someone who chose this work not for money — there isn’t much — but because I believed it mattered.

That belief is being tested right now in the most material way possible.

The cost of everything is going up. My field is being defunded. The political project currently reshaping public life seems less interested in building a livable future than in dismantling the institutions that make one possible. And I am sitting here, highly trained, genuinely skilled, deeply motivated — and unable to find stable work that uses any of it.

I am angry about that. Not the quiet, managed anger of a professional who knows how to stay composed. Real anger. The kind that comes from spending your career trying to help young people build the competencies to counter the ugliness and corruption in the world, and then discovering that the systems around you can’t find a job category for what you do.

And I know I’m not alone in this.

There are many of us — educators, curriculum designers, sustainability practitioners, public servants of every kind — who chose work that was supposed to matter, who trained for a world that keeps saying it needs us, and who are still waiting for something to open. We are not asking for guarantees. We are asking for coherence. For institutions that can actually recognize the work they claim to need.

I won’t let that anger become the whole story. But I’m not going to tuck it away either, because I think it’s information.

Something is wrong when a society produces people trained to teach, translate, and respond to complex crises, and then offers them no coherent place to stand. Something is wrong when the most human forms of work — designing learning, helping people navigate change, building the capacity to think and act well together — are needed everywhere and remain so difficult to fund and name.

The question isn’t only why can’t I find work?

The deeper question is: what kinds of work does this society actually know how to recognize?

If you run an organization working in education, sustainability, curriculum design, professional development, or community learning — and you need people who can do this work: teach it, design it, translate it, make it real for those who don’t yet have the language for it — we are here. We are looking. And we are very good at this.

I’m still applying, still translating myself into whatever language the next door requires.

But I’ve stopped believing the silence is a verdict.

It’s a design flaw — in the systems built to recognize expertise, not in the expertise itself.

If this resonates — or if you know someone it should reach — I’d welcome a conversation. You can find me here, or reach out directly.

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The turning point, historians now agree, didn’t happen at a climate summit or in a research lab. It happened in a drafty school music room, where a teacher decided to stop defending music and start expanding what it could do.

That sentence still stops me. Not because it’s surprising — not anymore — but because of how unnecessary it almost was. How close we came to losing the thing that turned out to matter most.

In 2026, most school districts were still arguing about whether music class was worth keeping. By 2045, we understand that was roughly equivalent to debating whether to keep the heart.

Here’s what actually happened. And why it was always going to be the music teachers.

Part One: Before

For most of the early twenty-first century, music education occupied what you might call a peculiar structural limbo: beloved by students, frequently invisible to leadership, perpetually on the wrong side of every budget conversation. The music room was, almost always, at the end of the hall. In the basement. In the portable classroom behind the main building.

The justifications changed — music improves math scores, music builds discipline, music develops character — but the logic stayed the same. The implicit message from policy, year after year: music education is worth keeping only if it serves something else.

The cruelest version of the public perception ran something like this: music class is where kids go to have fun and relax between the real subjects. This perception, more than any budget decision, was what music teachers had to contend with every single day. Not the budget meetings. The daily, ambient sense that their work was decorative. Nice. Optional.

Meanwhile, something called Education for Sustainable Development had been quietly spreading through schools since the 1990s. The idea was urgent and correct: students needed to understand complex systems, think across time horizons, navigate uncertainty, and develop the values and will to act. Because climate change, biodiversity loss, and social fragmentation were not problems that could be solved with a test. They required a different kind of human being.

So ESD landed, mostly, in science classrooms. In geography. In the occasional interdisciplinary elective. And it produced, mostly, anxiety. Data without agency. Information without transformation. Students who understood the problem and felt completely powerless to address it.

The emotional dimension — the fear, the grief, the overwhelming complexity of it all — went unaddressed, because many teachers in science classrooms had not been trained to deal with it. One study from the mid-2020s documented something researchers called “a worrying absence of emotional language in ESD teacher discourse.” Teachers feared sounding evangelical. They found values-teaching “potentially embarrassing.” The facts were supposed to be enough.

They weren’t enough. Everyone could see that.

What nobody was asking yet was: who in our schools is already equipped for this?

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Part Two: The Question Nobody Was Asking

The music teachers were right there.

That’s the thing that still takes my breath away, looking back. The competencies that Education for Sustainable Development was painstakingly trying to cultivate — systems thinking, anticipatory competence, values reflection, collaborative imagination, the capacity to hold complexity without fleeing it — were being practiced, in some form, in music classrooms every single day.

Ensemble playing is, among other things, an exercise in systems thinking. Every player must simultaneously track their own part, listen to the whole, adjust to what others are doing, and hold the structure of the piece in mind while responding to what’s happening in real time. That’s not a metaphor for systems thinking. That is systems thinking — embodied, practiced, repeated until it becomes reflexive.

Composition requires students to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist and work backward to create the conditions for it. That’s anticipatory competence. The ability to envision a future and then act to make it real.

Listening — real listening, the kind music education trains — is an act of radical attention to the world as it actually is. Not as you expect it to be, or wish it were. As it is. Researchers studying soundscape ecology had begun documenting this in the early 2020s: students who listened to their campus soundscape as if it were music — attending to rhythm, timbre, texture, the relationship between sounds — developed something different. A different quality of presence. A different relationship to the environment as something they were inside of, not observing from a distance.

And none of the teachers doing this were calling it ESD.

They were calling it choir rehearsal. They were calling it composition class. They were calling it “we’re going to spend ten minutes just listening today.”

What the research captured, in retrospect, was a naming gap — not a practice gap. The practices were there. The framework that could have dignified them, resourced them, and connected them to the crisis of the age had simply never arrived in the music room.

Part Three: What Teachers Had to Become

The shift, when it started happening, was not a curriculum change. It was something harder and stranger than that.

For decades, music teachers were trapped in a defensive crouch — constantly justifying their subject’s existence, producing evidence of music’s instrumental benefits, making the case for their own value in the language of whoever held the budget. The shift came when a handful of teachers stopped asking “how do I prove music matters?” and started asking “what does music already know that the world needs right now?”

That reframe — from defensive to generative — was the first crack of light.

But it required more than a new question. It required, in many cases, a genuine reckoning with who they were as educators. The research on this is clear and a little uncomfortable: you cannot develop sustainability competencies in your students while operating fully inside the worldview that sustainability education is designed to disrupt. Teachers had to change. Not their content knowledge. Themselves.

That meant examining what the dominant tradition of music education had actually been teaching, underneath the surface. And what it had been teaching, largely, was this: performance is individual achievement; music is a product to be perfected; success is measured by comparison with others; the audience judges. That’s not a neutral set of values. It’s the industrial paradigm with better acoustics. And it was exactly the paradigm that ESD was asking students to unlearn.

Teachers who made the shift describe it in terms of six distinct transformations:

From defender to explorer — the first crack of light.

From subject specialist to systems thinker — understanding their classroom as one node in a larger web of community, ecology, and time.

From comfort with beauty to willingness to sit with grief — this was perhaps the hardest shift. Arts teachers are drawn to their work because it produces something beautiful, moving, transcendent. ESD asked them to also hold ecological grief, climate anxiety, injustice, and loss as valid creative material. Many had to do their own grief work first — their own reckoning with the state of the world — before they could hold space for students to do the same.

From expert to co-inquirer — surrendering the authority of the teacher-as-technician and becoming someone who genuinely didn’t know the answers and was willing to find out alongside their students. This was disorienting. It felt, initially, like a loss of professional identity. The ones who leaned into it discovered it was actually a profound expansion of creative freedom.

From local to planetary — connecting the musical traditions of their own communities to the larger story of what human cultures had always known about living in relationship with the world.

From annual concert to living practice — the shift from music as a product to be judged, to music as an ongoing relationship with community and environment.

These teachers didn’t get there through professional development workshops. They got there through each other — scrappy, informal learning communities that formed in the margins of conferences, in email threads, in collective willingness to be confused together.

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Part Four: What Students Became

The ClimateMusic Project had been around since the mid-2010s, quietly doing what these teachers were only beginning to name: collaborating with climate scientists to translate data into emotional experience. Not charts. Not statistics. Music — because music reaches the people that facts cannot reach, through pathways that argument cannot open.

That distinction matters enormously. When you present someone with information that contradicts their existing worldview, the brain’s first move is to defend. To rationalize. To find a reason the information is wrong, or irrelevant, or oversimplified. But music doesn’t trigger that response. Music arrives sideways, through feeling, before the defenses are up.

Students in classrooms that were practicing this — intentionally or not — were developing something researchers would later call affective literacy: the capacity to move through difficult feeling without being destroyed by it, and without fleeing into numbness. To feel the weight of something real, and keep functioning.

In South Africa, the Field Band Foundation had been using community music ensemble to work explicitly toward what we now recognize as sustainable development goals — health, education, gender equity, youth empowerment — since the mid-1990s. Forty-five thousand young people over nearly three decades, using music not as an activity but as an infrastructure for dignity and collective identity.

In Colombia, Fundación Batuta had demonstrated that music ensemble, systematically applied to communities shattered by conflict, produced social cohesion that no other intervention had managed. “Music humanizes,” they said, after twenty-eight years of evidence. “This has been learned.”

The pattern was visible everywhere, if you knew where to look. Ensemble-trained students were showing up differently in rooms. They were used to holding a part while hearing the whole. They were practiced at negotiating tempo, dynamics, and interpretation with people they didn’t always agree with. They had, quite literally, rehearsed collective action — the patient, iterative, ego-dissolving work of making something together that none of them could make alone.

By 2030, a generation of students raised in music classrooms that had made this turn were entering community organizations, city councils, climate adaptation committees, and neighborhood assemblies. And something different was happening in those rooms.

It took a while to trace it back to where it came from.

Part Five: Why Music, Specifically

This is the question that still gets asked, and it deserves a real answer.

Not art in general. Not “creative subjects.” Music, specifically.

Three things set music apart.

The first is that music is entirely time-based. It exists only in duration — anticipation, arrival, memory, loss. You cannot hold a piece of music in your hand or step back to look at it all at once. You can only move through it. Students trained musically developed an unusual relationship with time: they could hold the past and the future simultaneously while staying present. In a civilization struggling to think beyond the next quarter or the next election cycle, students who could genuinely feel the long arc — who had literally practiced it, measure by measure — were transformative participants in any room they entered.

The second is that music is non-representational. It doesn’t show you a dying reef. It makes you feel something structurally similar to loss, or to wonder, or to urgency — without giving the brain a target to argue with. The philosopher in the climate scientist can explain why the data is being misinterpreted. There’s no equivalent move available against a cello section.

The third is that music is inherently, structurally collective. A painting can be made alone. A novel can be written alone. A symphony cannot be played alone. Ensemble music rehearses — physically, socially, over and over — the exact capacities that collective action requires: listening without interrupting, holding your part without drowning out others, adjusting to what’s happening in real time, and trusting that what you’re building together is worth more than what any one of you could produce independently.

These aren’t incidental features of music education. They are the pedagogy.

Part Six: The World It Made

By 2038, something that would have been called remarkable fifteen years earlier had become simply true: musical thinking was embedded in how communities approached adaptation. Not as a metaphor. As a practice.

The capacity to listen — trained through years of music education that had quietly expanded its sense of what listening was for — had become something close to a civic skill. Climate adaptation committees used it. So did water rights negotiations and public health planning boards. People who had spent years attending to the relationship between sounds, and to the relationship between what they were doing and what the ensemble was doing, were better equipped to attend to the relationship between systems. Between choices and consequences. Between present and future.

The teachers who had started this, mostly in underfunded rooms with no institutional support and no particular confidence that what they were doing was right, had mostly moved on by now. Some retired. Some became the administrators who had once ignored them. Some simply kept teaching.

Most of them didn’t fully understand, and may never fully understand, what they made.

Music education didn’t save the world by itself. That would be a sentimental overclaim, and the moment doesn’t deserve sentimentality. Structural policy change mattered. Investment in clean energy mattered. Legal frameworks and international agreements and the slow, grinding work of democratic institutions — all of it mattered.

But the people who showed up in those institutions, willing to do that grinding work without losing hope, willing to feel the weight of the problem without being flattened by it, willing to act together without needing someone to tell them how — those people had been made somewhere.

They had been made in the rooms at the end of the hall. In the basements. In the portable classrooms behind the main building.

Closing

The National Core Arts Standards asked music teachers to Connect. ESD showed them what there was, truly, to connect to — and the answer turned out to be everything.

What music and arts teachers ultimately produced — quietly, in underfunded rooms, over two decades — was a generation of people who could feel complexity without fleeing it, imagine futures without fearing them, listen to the world without needing it to be simple, and act together without needing to be told.

It turned out that was exactly what saving the world required.

References

Bates, V. C. (2013). Music Education Unplugged. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 12(2), 75–90. http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Bates12_2.pdf

Borg, C., Gericke, N., Höglund, H.-O., & Bergman, E. (2012). The barriers encountered by teachers implementing education for sustainable development: Discipline bound differences and teaching traditions. Research in Science & Technological Education, 30, 185–207. https://doi.org/10/f25rqh

Ferguson, T., Roofe, C., & Cook, L. D. (2021). Teachers’ perspectives on sustainable development: The implications for education for sustainable development. Environmental Education Research, 27(9), 1343–1359. https://doi.org/10/gjwp8t

Goller, A., & Rieckmann, M. (2022). What do We Know About Teacher Educators’ Perceptions of Education for Sustainable Development? A Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability, 24(1), 19–34. https://doi.org/10/gr45dx

Hess, J. (2019). Music education for social change: Constructing an activist music education. Routledge.

Hesser, B., & Bartleet, B.-L. (2020). Music as a Global Resource: Solutions for Cultural, Social, Health, Educational, Environmental, and Economic Issues (5th ed.). Music as a Global Resource. https://www.musicasaglobalresource.org/

IPCC. (2022). Summary for Policymakers (p. 35). https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg2/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf

Macintyre, T., Tilbury, D., & Wals, A. (2024). Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 Years of Learning for Environment and Change. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003467007

Østergaard, E. (2019). Music and sustainability education – a contradiction? Acta Didactica Norge, 13, 2. https://doi.org/10/gqr8nm

Reid, A., & Petocz, P. (2021). Educating musicians for sustainability. Routledge.

Shevock, D. J. (2017). Eco-literate music pedagogy: Routledge new directions in music education. Routledge.

Sulla, F., Fantinelli, S., Toto, G. A., Peconio, G., & Esposito, C. (2024). Exploring Attitudes toward Sustainability Education in a Group of Italian Preservice Teachers: The Role of Environmental Identity and Sense of Community Responsibility. Social Sciences, 13(5), 241. https://doi.org/10/gtw4cz

The first time I used the Critical Response Process (CRP) in one of my college classes, I wasn’t sure it would land.

Liz Lerman developed it from 1990 onward in arts settings — a structured way of moving through feedback that she’d refined with dancers, theater makers, visual artists, and community groups (Lerman & Borstel, 2003). I’d learned it directly from her, and I believed in it. But I also knew that what works in an art studio doesn’t automatically transfer to a classroom. Students have their own rhythms. Their own defenses. Their own histories with being told their work isn’t quite right.

So I held my breath a little.

By the third session, I’d stopped worrying.

More students were speaking up — not just the ones who always did. The questions people asked each other were more precise, more genuinely curious. And the tone in the room had shifted in a way I found hard to name at first. It wasn’t warmer, exactly. It was more steady. More focused. Like everyone had quietly agreed to take the conversation seriously.

Nothing about the content of the class had changed. Same material. Same students. Same me.

What had changed was the structure they were working inside.

And that, I’d come to realize, changes everything.

What We Leave Out

Most of what we teach in school is about what to know and what to produce.

We spend almost no time on what happens in the space between those two things — the moment when someone shares something they made, or said, or thought, and everyone else has to decide how to respond.

That moment is a skill. We just don’t treat it like one.

So students do what people always do when they haven’t been taught something: they improvise. They fall back on patterns they’ve picked up somewhere — quick opinions, surface observations, polite nods, or silence. Not because they’re disengaged. Often because they genuinely don’t know what else to do.

I’d watched this happen for years before I had a name for it.

What CRP Actually Does

The Critical Response Process is structured in four steps (Lerman & Borstel, 2003):

First, responders share what was meaningful to them — not what they liked or didn’t like, just what stayed with them. Second, the person who made the work gets to ask a question they actually care about. Third, responders ask their own neutral questions — curious, open, not leading anywhere in particular. Fourth, and only if the creator invites it, opinions come in.

There are roles, too. The creator shares and asks. Responders notice, question, and offer within the structure. A facilitator holds the shape of the conversation so it doesn’t drift back into old habits.

At first glance, this can feel constraining. Students sometimes push against it. Why can’t I just say what I think?

But that constraint is the point.

When people know what’s expected — and what isn’t — they relax in a different way. They don’t have to compete for airtime or brace for something sharp. They don’t feel pressure to have the “right” answer on the spot or defend their thinking in real time. The structure holds some of that tension so they don’t have to.

In one class, a student shared a piece of music they’d clearly been nervous about. You could see it in the way they held the paper, the way they looked at the table instead of the room. In a typical discussion, someone would have jumped in with an opinion — probably a kind one, but still an evaluation. Instead, the first few responses were: What stood out to me was… and I’m curious how you were thinking about… Then the student asked a question they actually wanted answered.

The conversation that followed lasted longer than usual. More people spoke. And no one had to remind anyone to be respectful — it was just already happening.

I’ve thought about that session a lot since.

A Skill Gap, Not a Values Gap

I want to say something that might sound obvious but I think gets missed:

Most people aren’t bad at conversation because they don’t care. They’re bad at it because they were never shown how.

We talk a lot about listening, empathy, and respectful dialogue as values — things people should want to have. And most people do want them. But wanting something doesn’t mean you know how to do it, especially under pressure, especially when something feels personal.

What I’ve seen in classrooms, and increasingly in the world outside them, is that when disagreement escalates or conversations shut down, it’s usually not a values problem. It’s a skills problem. People don’t have the moves. They don’t know how to ask a question instead of firing back, or how to stay with discomfort without either shutting down or escalating.

Those moves are learnable. We just have to actually teach them.

Why This Is a Sustainability Problem

When sustainability researchers and educators talk about what K–12 teachers need to develop in their students, they don’t just mean content knowledge about climate or ecosystems. They mean competencies — ways of thinking and working together that make collective action possible.

Collaboration is central to almost every framework. So are systems thinking, the ability to sit with uncertainty, and the capacity to work across differences toward shared goals. UNESCO’s framework for Education for Sustainable Development identifies these as essential — eight key competencies, including collaboration, systems thinking, anticipatory thinking, and integrated problem-solving, that together describe not just what students should know, but how they should be able to work with others (UNESCO, 2017). Sustainability isn’t just a set of problems to solve; it’s a way of being in relation to others while you try to solve them.

These competencies don’t develop on their own. They need to be practiced — which means teachers need structures that make the practice possible inside the rhythms of a real classroom, not just in theory.

That’s where structured dialogue comes in.

Not dialogue in the narrow sense of “taking turns talking” — but in the fuller sense of how students actually respond to each other, how they handle disagreement, whether the process holds when things get hard. That ongoing responsiveness is the connective tissue of any group trying to work on something that matters. Without it, collaboration becomes performance. Systems thinking stays abstract. The capacity to work across differences collapses into either conflict or silence.

Music classrooms are actually a particularly natural home for this kind of work. Creative subjects already ask students to share something they made and have others respond to it — which means the conditions for practicing structured dialogue are already present. Music teachers can use CRP not just to improve how students talk about each other’s work, but to explicitly teach the interpersonal and collaborative competencies that ESD frameworks identify as essential (Lerman & Borstel, 2003; UNESCO, 2017). And because those moves are practiced in a low-stakes, creative context, they become easier to carry into harder conversations elsewhere.

But music classrooms are just one entry point. The same capacity matters across every subject and every grade level — anywhere students have to work together across different perspectives on problems without easy answers.

If students can’t respond to each other in ways that keep the process alive, the sustainability competencies we care about remain theoretical. Good intentions don’t fill that gap. Shared structure does.

Where to Start

You don’t need to introduce the full process on day one. You don’t even need to call it anything.

Try this: after someone shares work, before anyone responds, ask the room — What stood out to you as meaningful? Let a few people answer. Then ask the creator: What’s a question you have about your own work? Take a few neutral questions. Stop there.

That’s it. That’s enough to feel the difference.

Or, even simpler: the next time a student brings you a problem and you’re about to jump in with advice, pause and ask first — Would you like to hear an opinion? It’s a small move. But it changes what happens next.

What I Was Actually Teaching

When I look back at those early sessions with CRP, what strikes me now is how much was happening beneath the surface.

Students weren’t just learning to give better feedback. They were learning how to stay in a shared process — how to listen without already forming their response, how to ask a question without having an agenda, how to be uncertain in public without it feeling like a threat.

They were learning, in other words, how to work with other people.

I used to think of that as a byproduct of good teaching. Now I think it might be the thing itself.

You don’t need a new curriculum to start this. You don’t need to overhaul your practice or master every ESD framework before you begin. You just need one structured moment — one question asked before the opinions rush in — and the willingness to try it again tomorrow.

That’s enough to start.

References

Lerman, L. (2026). Critical response process: A method for giving and getting feedback. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. https://lizlerman.com/critical-response-process/

Lerman, L., & Borstel, J. (2003). Liz Lerman’s critical response process: A method for getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert. Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

UNESCO. (2017). Education for sustainable development goals: Learning objectives. UNESCO. https://doi.org/10.54675/CGBA9153

“I don’t have time to add sustainability.”
Or:
“I wouldn’t even know what that looks like in music.”

Both are completely valid.

Most approaches to sustainability in education feel like add-ons—new content, new units, new expectations layered onto an already full plate.

But what if it didn’t work that way?

What if you didn’t add anything at all—
and instead changed the kind of project students do?

A Different Way to Think About It

Here’s the shift:

Sustainability doesn’t need to be added as content—it can function as the context for creative work.

In my own work as a music educator, I’ve explored this through collaborative projects that combine music, sustainability, and futures thinking.

Instead of treating sustainability as something to cover, we treated it as something students could explore, imagine, and express through music itself.

That’s a subtle shift, but an important one.

It means:

• Music isn’t supporting the learning

• Music is the medium of the learning

Students aren’t just learning about sustainability.
They’re using music to think through it.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Here’s the project, in one sentence:

Students imagine a future powered by sustainable energy—and create music that expresses what that world is like.

What made this work wasn’t more content.

It was the structure.

The Entry Point: A Design Brief

Instead of a traditional assignment, students are given a challenge:

It’s the year 2045. Your community has transitioned to renewable energy.
Your city is commissioning new musical works that reflect what life feels like in this world.
Create a piece of music that tells that story—how people live, connect, and experience music in a sustainable future.

That’s it.

No required genre.
No fixed structure.
No single “right” answer.

Just a direction.

What this does:

• Creates a context, not just a task

• Invites interpretation instead of compliance

• Opens space for multiple valid responses

Students begin asking:

• What might daily life feel like in a sustainable world?

• How would that shape sound, rhythm, or instruments?

• What emotions or experiences would be different?

These are systems questions—but they emerge naturally through creative work.

How the Project Unfolds

The structure can stay simple.

1. Spark Curiosity
Students briefly explore ideas like energy, daily life, or how artists respond to social and environmental change. This can be light—just enough to get them thinking.

2. Introduce the Challenge
You present the design brief, then step back. Students begin interpreting:

• What does a sustainable future feel like?

• What might music sound like in that world?

3. Create
Students choose how to respond. They might:

• Compose

• Write lyrics

• Design instruments

• Work individually or collaboratively

The key shift is in what you emphasize.

Instead of asking:
“Did you follow the rules of composition?”

You’re asking:
“What are you expressing—and how does your music communicate that?”

4. Reflect and Discuss
Students share:

• What kind of future they imagined

• Why they made certain choices

• What their work suggests about the present

This is where much of the learning becomes visible.

What Changes for You as the Teacher

This kind of project can feel unfamiliar at first, because your role shifts.

Instead of directing toward a specific musical outcome, you are:

• Facilitating inquiry

• Supporting exploration

• Helping students articulate their thinking

You’re still teaching music—but you’re also creating space for students to use music as a way of understanding the world.

And importantly:

The goal is not perfect music.
It’s thoughtful, expressive engagement.

What Students Actually Learn

Even without a traditional unit structure, students develop:

• Systems thinking
  Seeing how energy, society, and daily life connect

• Futures thinking
  Exploring what could be—not just what is

• Agency
  Recognizing that their ideas and perspectives matter

• Creative expression
  Communicating complex ideas through music

Often, engagement increases—because the work feels meaningful, not procedural.

One Practical Tool: The “Future Sound” Mini-Project

Time: 1–2 class periods

Step 1 (5 min):
Ask: “What might music sound like in a sustainable future?”

Step 2 (10–15 min):
Students brainstorm sounds, moods, environments, or instruments.

Step 3 (20–30 min):
Students create a short musical sketch (no expectation of a finished piece).

Step 4 (10–15 min):
Share and briefly discuss:

• What did you imagine?

• What influenced your choices?

Two cautions:

• Keep the scope small—this is exploration, not performance

• Avoid over-directing—let different interpretations emerge

Try This Tomorrow

Ask one question:

“What might music sound like in a sustainable future?”

Give students 10–15 minutes to sketch an idea.

Let a few share.

That’s enough to begin.

A Final Thought

It’s easy to treat music as separate from the larger issues students are living through.

But students don’t experience the world in separate categories.

When you give them space to create in response to complex ideas, they begin to connect disciplines in ways that feel natural and meaningful.

You don’t need a new unit.
You don’t need perfect alignment.

A small shift in the kind of task you design can open up entirely new ways of thinking.

And that’s often where this work begins.

Reference

• Smith, B., & Beach, R. (2023). Youth Created Media on the Climate Crisis: Hear Our Voices (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003335276

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This piece starts somewhere different.

It starts with how you see.

Before the classroom, there is the teacher

Sustainability doesn’t begin with lessons or curriculum.

It begins in everyday moments — what you notice when you’re rushing, what you prioritize when time is tight, and how you make decisions when no one is watching and there’s no framework to consult.

Before it can show up in your teaching, it has to develop in you.

That’s the starting point most approaches skip.

The moment that happens every day

You’re moving through your day. The pace is tight. Something happens — a comment, a decision, a small tension — that could open into something worth examining.

But there’s no time.

So you move on.

This is ordinary. Unremarkable. And it happens dozens of times a day.

But something real just occurred. A decision was made — not just about time, but about what matters, what’s worth pursuing, and what gets to count as important.

Most of these decisions are invisible. They happen fast, shaped by habit and pressure and constraint.

This is where sustainability actually lives. Not in the content you teach. In the decisions you make before you ever enter a classroom.

Sustainability isn’t something you add

Most approaches to sustainability in education begin by adding something.

But life is already full. Teachers are navigating full days, competing demands, and real constraints. Adding more rarely helps — more often, it just intensifies the pressure.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe instead: much of what sustainability requires is already present in how we live and act. It just isn’t recognized yet.

So the question isn’t what to add. It’s how you make decisions within the conditions that already exist.

Sustainability, in this sense, isn’t a subject. It’s a way of seeing, valuing, and acting. It shows up in how you use time, what you prioritize, and what you notice in ordinary moments.

Education for Sustainable Development names this clearly — describing capacities like systems thinking, values awareness, and informed decision-making as the real work. Not content delivery. Capacity development.

The shift is already available to you. It just needs to be seen.

How this shift began for me

I’m a music teacher. And for a long time, I felt completely disconnected from sustainability.

I cared deeply about it — about the future of the planet, about the wellbeing of people. But from inside my field, it felt distant. Almost irrelevant. I couldn’t draw a line between what I taught and what the world seemed to need.

At my lowest point, I wondered if I needed to become something else. A scientist, maybe. A STEM teacher. Someone whose work obviously mattered in that way.

So instead of switching fields, I started asking questions. Unusual ones, at first.

What is the connection between music and solar panels? How could climate efforts draw on what music does to people? What would sustainability in music education look like if it went deeper than a recycling project?

Some of the questions felt embarrassing. I asked them anyway.

And slowly, something shifted. My question changed from What should I add? to What connections are already here that I haven’t learned to see?

That one change changed everything.

Music was no longer separate from sustainability. It became a way of engaging with it — through perception, emotion, culture, and human experience. The field I’d almost abandoned turned out to be full of exactly what sustainability needs: the ability to hold complexity, to sit with feeling, to imagine what hasn’t existed yet.

Around this time, I discovered Education for Sustainable Development. What struck me was that it didn’t give me something new. It gave language to what I was already beginning to experience. It confirmed that the shift I’d made — from adding to seeing — was the real work.

It didn’t redirect my path. It clarified it.

A simple practice for real days

If this is going to be useful, it has to work inside an actual day — not as something extra, but as something embedded in moments that are already happening.

Here’s what I use:

Notice → Clarify → Choose → Act → Reflect → Repeat

• Notice what’s happening, internally and externally

• Clarify what matters in that moment

• Choose a response, even a small one

• Act within your constraints

• Reflect briefly: What did I notice? What might I try differently?

• Repeat — not constantly, but consistently

It takes one to three minutes. It doesn’t require a new block in your schedule. You choose one moment in your day and stay with it slightly longer than you normally would.

That’s it.

What this looks like in practice

This isn’t about dramatic change. It’s about small shifts in moments that already exist.

At the grocery store, you notice a tension between cost and environmental impact. You pause, clarify what actually matters to you, make a choice, and briefly register what shaped it.

In a conversation, you feel the urge to react. You pause instead. You ask a question. You notice how the exchange shifts.

In a busy day, something meaningful flashes by. You pause for three seconds, acknowledge it, and move on — but with greater awareness than you had before.

These moments are small. They are not insignificant.

Over time, they train your attention. You begin to see patterns, relationships, and trade-offs more clearly. You become more aware of what’s actually shaping your decisions — and more intentional in how you respond.

This is the foundation. And eventually, it stops being a practice.

It becomes how you move through the world. And from there — without forcing it, without adding anything — it becomes how you teach.

Try this tomorrow

Choose one moment. It can be anywhere — a conversation, a commute, a decision at the shops, a song you hear.

When something slightly unexpected happens, pause and ask:

What is shaping this moment — and what might it connect to?

You don’t need to resolve it. Just stay with it a few seconds longer than you normally would.

That’s enough to begin.

A closing thought

You don’t build sustainability by adding more.

You build it by changing how you see — within the life you’re already living.

It starts with a music teacher who felt irrelevant, asking questions that felt embarrassing, and slowly discovering that the connections were there all along.

They’re there for you too.

You just have to learn to look.

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In many classrooms, that moment will probably pass quietly—another headline, another image, another historic milestone briefly noted before the next lesson begins. Teachers are used to this rhythm. Big global events arrive, carry a sense of importance, and then dissolve into the background of already full curricula.

But there’s a quieter challenge underneath this: how do we help students actually see what these moments offer?

Because we have, in a sense, already seen this before.

We have seen Earth from space. We have seen it whole, boundaryless, suspended in darkness. We have taught about climate systems, sustainability, interdependence. And yet, despite all of this, the core difficulty remains. Students can know all of this—and still experience the world as fragmented, distant, and abstract.

So the question isn’t whether Artemis II gives us something new to show.

It’s whether it gives us another chance to help students see differently.

This isn’t really about space. It points to a problem many of us run into in classrooms—especially in subjects like music—where students can understand something, but not quite feel its meaning.

The Core Insight: Distance Changes What Becomes Visible

When astronauts describe looking back at Earth from lunar orbit, they consistently describe a shift that is difficult to replicate on the ground.

It’s not just the view. It’s the conditions.

Distance. Silence. Scale.

From that vantage point, familiar context falls away. The constant noise of everyday life is gone. What remains is a single, bounded system—small, luminous, and visibly finite.

This is often described as the “Overview Effect,” but the name can make it sound like something reserved for spaceflight. In reality, it points to something more fundamental:

Perception changes with distance.

When we are inside a system, we tend to see parts. With some distance, we begin to notice relationships.

From lunar orbit, Earth is no longer a collection of countries, issues, or subjects. It becomes a single, interconnected whole. And that shift is not only visual—it is cognitive, emotional, and ethical at the same time.

Astronauts often describe two feelings occurring together: awe and vulnerability. The planet appears beautiful—but also fragile. That fragility matters. It can change how the system is valued. It can create a sense of care, even responsibility.

This is the key:

Seeing differently can reorganize what feels meaningful—and what feels worth acting on.

And that leads to an important implication for education:

It starts to look like, at least in classrooms, the barrier to sustainability often isn’t a lack of knowledge.

It’s a lack of perceptual conditions that make that knowledge matter.

Why This Matters for Classrooms

In most classrooms, everything is set up for proximity.

Subjects are separated. Time is divided. Problems are addressed in parts. This structure is efficient—but it can also fragment perception.

Students learn about ecosystems in science, expression in music, ethics in social studies, and data in math. But they don’t always experience these as part of a single, living system.

It’s like studying puzzle pieces without ever assembling the puzzle.

Most teachers have seen some version of this:

Students can explain climate change clearly on a test—and still not feel its urgency or relevance in daily life.

The issue isn’t misunderstanding.

It’s that the system has rarely been perceived as a whole.

Images like Earthrise in 1968 disrupted this. They compressed complexity into something immediately graspable: a whole Earth, without borders, suspended in space. That image helped catalyze environmental awareness because it shifted perception first.

Now, more than fifty years later, Artemis II offers a similar image—technically clearer, widely shared, instantly accessible.

And yet, there is a complication.

We are no longer seeing this for the first time.

Repeated exposure can reduce impact. What was once disorienting becomes familiar. The image risks becoming symbolic rather than transformative.

So the task for educators is not simply to show the image again.

It is to recreate some of the conditions that make the image meaningful.

Translating This Into Practice

If we can’t send students to lunar orbit—and we can’t—then the practical question becomes:

What are the classroom equivalents of distance, silence, and scale?

This is where small design choices matter.

1. Create moments of cognitive distance
Instead of beginning with details, begin with the whole.

• Show an image of Earth before introducing the topic

• Ask: What do you notice when you don’t zoom in yet?

• Delay explanation long enough for perception to begin forming

Understanding often follows perception—not the other way around.

2. Reduce informational noise—temporarily
We often add more information to create understanding. But here, less can help.

• Short silent observation periods

• Minimal prompts before discussion

• Fewer slides, more space to notice

Extreme environments create reflection partly because they remove distraction. Classrooms can approximate this in small ways.

3. Use comparison to reactivate perception
Place the 1968 Earthrise image next to a recent or contemporary Earth image.

Ask:

• What is the same?

• What feels different?

• What do you assume from what you see?

This helps students recognize that meaning comes not just from the image—but from interpretation.

4. Bring in embodied systems experiences (including music)
Music offers a powerful parallel.

In an ensemble, students don’t analyze interdependence—they experience it. Timing, balance, responsiveness—these are lived, not abstract.

After a group performance or activity, you can ask:

• What happened when one part changed?

• How did the whole respond?

Then connect that experience to larger systems:

• ecosystems

• communities

• the planet itself

This helps bridge perception across domains.

One Practical Tool: “Zoom Out, Then In”

Time: 20–30 minutes
Goal: Help students experience a perceptual shift before analysis

Steps:

1. Show an image of Earth from space (Artemis II if available) with no explanation

2. Ask students to silently observe for 60–90 seconds

3. Prompt: What do you notice when you look at the whole, not the parts?

4. Collect responses without evaluation

5. Only then connect to your current unit (climate, geography, systems, etc.)

6. Revisit the image at the end: What do you see now that you didn’t before?

Cautions:

• Resist the urge to explain too quickly

• Avoid turning the moment into a fact-recall exercise

The aim is not immediate accuracy—it is perceptual grounding.

Try This Tomorrow

Start one class with a single image of Earth.

Say very little.

Give students one minute to look.

Then ask one question:

“What becomes easier to notice when you step back this far?”

Closing Permission

Artemis II will not solve the challenge of sustainability education.

Neither did Apollo 8.

What these moments offer is something quieter, but still powerful: a reminder that how we see shapes what we understand, what we value, and what we act on.

That shift doesn’t automatically lead to action. But it can change what feels noticeable—and what feels worth paying attention to.

In classrooms, we don’t need to recreate the intensity of space travel.

But we can design small moments of distance.
We can make space for noticing.
We can help students experience systems before analyzing them.

It’s not dramatic.

But it might be enough to matter.

And in complex systems—classrooms included—small shifts in perception are often where everything else begins.

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Then comes the question:

“So… do you mean writing songs about climate change?”

It’s a fair question. An honest one.

Music can be used that way. Students can write, perform, and respond to issues like climate change, justice, and community. That work matters.

But that’s not primarily what I mean.

A different way of seeing the connection

When I talk about sustainability in music education, I’m not talking about adding new content to an already full curriculum.

I’m pointing to something deeper.

Music develops the exact cognitive, emotional, and action capacities required across disciplines.

Put differently, music is not another subject competing for space—it is a mode of learning that develops the capacities underlying all subjects and sustainability competencies.

That shift—from what music teaches to what music develops—changes everything.

Music as a rehearsal space for the real world

A phrase that helps make this visible:

Music is a rehearsal space for the real world.

In rehearsal, we don’t just practice content—we practice ways of being.

In music classrooms, students are constantly practicing how to:

• listen across a system

• adjust in real time

• coordinate with others

• make decisions under uncertainty

• persist through difficulty

• create and communicate meaning

These are not just musical skills.

They are the same capacities required to navigate complex systems—ecological, social, and human.

What this looks like in practice

Take a typical ensemble rehearsal.

On the surface, students are working on balance, timing, entrances, and tone. But underneath, something more is happening.

They are learning to hear how their part fits within a larger whole. They are adjusting in response to what they hear. They are experiencing, in real time, how one small change affects everything else.

This is systems thinking—not as an abstract idea, but as lived experience.

Now consider composition.

Students imagine possibilities, try ideas, revise them, and shape them over time. They make decisions about structure, direction, and meaning.

Here, composition becomes futures thinking and design.

Or improvisation.

Students respond in the moment, adapt to others, make decisions without full certainty, and continue forward.

Improvisation becomes adaptive problem-solving.

Even individual practice plays a role. It develops persistence, self-regulation, and the ability to improve through iteration.

These are not side benefits.

They are central.

Why this connection is often missed

And yet, this way of seeing music is rarely how it’s framed.

Most of us have been trained to think about education in terms of subjects:

• Science teaches science

• Math teaches math

• Music teaches music

But subjects don’t just deliver content. They also develop capacities—the ways we think, feel, and act.

Because those capacities are rarely named, they often remain invisible.

So when we hear “music and sustainability,” we default to the most visible connection: songs about climate change.

That’s understandable.

But it’s only a small part of what’s actually happening.

A small shift for teachers

The goal here is not to add more.

It’s to begin seeing your teaching differently.

A simple question can help:

What is this moment really teaching?

Not just musically—though that still matters.

More broadly.

• In ensemble → students may be practicing interdependence and responsive listening

• In composition → students may be practicing imagination and revision

• In improvisation → students may be practicing flexibility and decision-making

Once you begin to notice this, you can make it visible for students.

That’s where things start to shift.

Try this tomorrow (2 small moves)

If you’re curious how this looks in practice—without adding anything new—start here:

1. Name one hidden capacity

During rehearsal, pause briefly and say something like:

“Notice how you adjusted to each other just now—that’s what working in a system looks like.”

“You kept trying different approaches—that’s how problem-solving works.”

It takes less than 10 seconds—and helps students connect what they’re doing to how learning works more broadly.

2. Add one reflection question

At the end of a rehearsal or activity, ask:

“What did you have to pay attention to in order for that to work?”

“What changed when you listened more closely to each other?”

“What did you do when something didn’t go as planned?”

You’re not adding a new unit—just making existing learning more visible.

From content to capacity

Over time, these small moves begin to add up.

Teachers start to recognize what is already happening, name it for students, and design for it more intentionally.

Music remains fully musical—while also becoming more clearly connected to the broader purposes of education.

Returning to the original question

So no—music and sustainability is not just about writing songs about climate change.

It’s about something deeper.

It’s about how we prepare students to understand and navigate a complex world.

Music is one of the few places in education where thinking, feeling, and doing are fully integrated—where students practice how to listen, adapt, collaborate, create, and persist.

These are not peripheral skills.

They are foundational.

And when we begin to see that clearly, music education starts to look less like an “extra” and more like a vital part of how we build a sustainable future.

If this resonates, I’d be curious what questions or areas of music and sustainability you’re still trying to make sense of.

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