Toolkit for the Interdisciplinary Infusion of the SDGs into Classrooms

Education and ESL

The following resources are related to the world of Education and ESL and will provide instructors with materials to support, introduce and infuse the SDGs into their lessons.

  • Read the British Council’s Climate Action in Language Education: Activities for Low Resource Classrooms. This publication provides teachers with a bank of thirty activities, based on ten climate change themes, with step-by-step guidance for each lesson. A range of levels and age groups are covered and each explores climate change through one of ten topics, from sports to storms and from farming to fashion.
  • Read the Careers lesson plan  that infuses SDGs #8 and #9. Students will explore career options, impacts on their lives and on the world around them, and careers in a global context.

  • Read the Child Brides: Stolen Lives lesson plan from the United States Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series NOW. It provides a startling insight into the issue of child brides in many developing countries. The production team travelled to Niger, India and Guatemala to report on a global custom that devastates lives and keeps communities from prospering.

  • Visit The Choices Program from Brown University that creates educational resources and makes innovative scholarship accessible to diverse classrooms. It empowers students to understand the relationship between history and current issues while developing analytical skills to become thoughtful global citizens. The site includes free lessons.
  • Visit Eco Schools lesson plans that promote an action oriented pedagogy about specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The lesson are available in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese
  • Read the Forced to Flee lesson plan. The learning objective is to transform thinking and inspire action around conflict, migration, and refugees.

  • The Global Schools Program is a UN initiative that develops the tools, resources and programs to support education systems around the world in shaping a more resilient and sustainable world. 
  • SDG 4: Quality Education – A Manager’s Place in Canada: An Introduction to the Indigenous Context lesson is from the Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. This lesson provides an introduction to the history of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. The resources cover Territorial Acknowledgements, the historical background in Canada, terminology, statistics on Indigenous Peoples in Canada, a brief history of Crown-Indigenous relations, and lastly, Indigenization and Decolonization. While this lesson is neither exhaustive nor absolute, it is a starting point to understand the historical Indigenous context for doing business in Canada, with a focus on reconciliation and decolonization.

  • Review the Hungry for Food Security – The East African Experience lesson. It introduces students to the issue of food insecurity with an emphasis on East Africa. It has statistics, examples and case studies. Students will also learn the factors impacting food insecurity and will be provided with an overview of some grassroots approaches to enhancing food security in rural African communities.

  • Visit My Hero Project  for lesson plans around media, art and technology. The website shines a light on positive role models to help students realize their own potential to make positive change in the world. 

  • Visit Learning for Justice for a Lesson Bank of ready-to-use classroom lessons that offer breadth and depth of essential social justice topics and can be filtered by level, subject, topic or social justice domain. 

  • Read various lesson plans from Population Education related to Language Arts.

  • The documents listed below are multimedia educational and pedagogical resources and ideas for classroom activities and lesson plans for infusing the SDGs. See the following:

SDG #1 No Poverty

SDG #2 Zero Hunger

SDG#3 Good Health and Wellbeing

SDG#4 Quality Education

SDG#5 Gender Equality

SDG#6 Clean Water and Sanitation

SDG#7 Affordable and Clean Energy

SDG#8 Decent Work and Economic Growth

SDG#9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

SDG#10 Reduced Inequalities

SDG#11 Sustainable Cities and Communities

SDG#12 Responsible Consumption and Production

SDG#13 Climate Action

SDG#14 Life Below Water

SDG#15 Life on Land

SDG#16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

SDG#17 Partnerships for the Goals

  • Read Using Media and Text to Nurture Global Citizenship by Nikysha Gilliam and Therese Bower. Educators will be challenged to identify ethical issues, connect them to the United Nation’s SDGs and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and design creative solutions to address the issues. Educators will also learn about a foundational course that introduces students to the concepts and vocabulary of global education and develops in them the critical thinking and communication skills they need to be agents of positive change. Resources and examples are provided to explore complex global challenges such as access to education, climate change, migration, and gender equality.
  • Visit the Wakelet SDG page for lesson plans, links, videos, student challenges, activities, infographics and tasks for all of the 17 SDGs.

Edutopia

Edutopia serves as a lighthouse for educational innovation, providing a vision for integrating 21st-century skills into lifelong learning. Through showcasing best practices and innovation in real-world education, it inspires educators, students, and policymakers to transform education for the better. Explore Edutopia’s vision for education and its commitment to project-based learning, social and emotional learning, and technological advancement.

These case studies from Edutopia offer inspiring examples of how integrating various academic subjects and adopting innovative teaching methods can prepare students for a world where knowledge is interconnected and sustainability is key. Each case study demonstrates the potential for educational practices to contribute towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by fostering an environment of innovation, critical thinking, and holistic learning.

  • A Handy Framework for Designing Units of Study is a framework for designing a compelling learning journey that marries people, places, and problems, encouraging real-world connections. This methodology aligns with Quality Education (SDG 4) and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11) by promoting immersive, problem-solving educational experiences.
  • How to Get Kids Moving in Every Subject involves incorporating movement into every lesson to boost engagement, memory retention, and fun, supporting Good Health and Well-being (SDG 3) and Quality Education (SDG 4). This is a dynamic way to enhance learning and physical wellness simultaneously.
  • Designing Interdisciplinary Units in Elementary School is an eight-step guide to crafting units that blend science, social studies, math, and language arts, promoting an integrated learning experience. This method champions Quality Education (SDG 4) and Life on Land (SDG 15) by encouraging holistic understanding and respect for our planet through interdisciplinary education.

More Case Studies

  • Read Dr. Jason Watkins’ study Hungry and Hesitant: An Exploration of the Experience of Stigma Among On-Campus Food Pantry Users . This phenomenological research was grounded in reflective lifeworld research and focused on college food insecurity through shared, lived experiences and noted three emerging themes and the strategies participants used to navigate the stigma. His findings can contribute towards informing best practices and creating strategies for administrators that promote inclusion and service utilization
  • The Women in Coffee Project aims to create a platform for women who are leaders as coffee producers, importers, and exporters to offer their perspective in this complex industry. It encourages independence and income for women coffee farmers in Kenya. Despite doing 70 per cent of the work growing coffee, many women are not given rights to what they grow.
  • The Sustainable Development Goals Fund has an online database of sustainable development case studies and a selection of effective practices on how to achieve a sustainable world and advance the 17 SDGs.
  • Golden Thread is a British Council-led program that promotes well being and freedom of expression through arts and creativity. The program emphasizes self-expression, self-awareness, and building social and cultural capital, aiming to reduce premature mortality from non-communicable diseases and promote mental health.
  • 30 Self Nudges for the SDGs is an SDG i-Level Project that launched the Self-Nudging Online Toolkit for University Staff on SDGs. Self-Nudges help remind university teachers and staff of the relevance of their work to the SDGs, prompting them to think about sustainable development, apply this mental framework to their work and as a result create more contributions to SDGs while feeling better about what they do. A continuous and reinforced engagement with the SDGs will create a mindset conducive to forging new individual contributions to sustainable development and the SDGs.
  • Visit Actively Learn with content for texts and videos for ELA, Science, and Social Studies with scaffolds and higher-order questions. Instructors can find what they teach and pair that with texts and videos or add what they like. Instructors can take whole class, small group, jigsaw, close reads, and more to the next level.
  • Visit Alliance 87, an organization specifically focused on Target 8.7 and joining forces to provide educational resources, facts and graphics around ending forced labour, modern slavery, human trafficking and child labour around the world.
  • Read Advancing the SDGs at Canadian Universities. 
  • The Black Curriculum in the UK is a grassroots social enterprise founded by young people to address the lack of Black British history in the UK curriculum and has resources related to Geography, Sociology, Law, English, and History. 
  • Visit NLP’s Checkology for lessons and resources show you how to navigate today’s challenging information landscape. Learn how to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources, and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods. Checkology gives you the habits of mind and tools to evaluate and interpret information. 
  • Visit CuriPow, a platform that lets curiosity empower people with a short untold story each day on the diversity of history through cultural identity and heritage. All the CuriShorts are researched and curated from The Library of Congress.  
  • Visit the Data Hub of The Government of Canada, the focal point for reporting Canada’s data for the SDG indicators. They partner with many councils and organizations, and include all 17 goals. Some notable examples of SDGs featured include Gender, Diversity and Inclusion statistics, Human Activity and the Environment.
  • Visit DigCitCommitt to learn about teaching digital citizenship that encourages being inclusive, informed, engaged, balanced and alert.
  • Visit DROPS Language, a Kahoot company that provides short word games with mnemonic associations. There are over 45 languages. People interested in learning character-based languages or languages with a different writing system, can view Scripts.
  • Visit the Education and Training Foundation for a wealth of resources for ESOL including a Green Week Toolkit, a curriculum audit and resources to tackle local sustainability issues. You can also visit ETF’s Resources page with links to resources, research and thought pieces.
  • Visit Faculty for a Future and search the Seed Library It is a searchable database of open-access educational resources that can support educators and students by integrating sustainability into discipline-specific teaching and learning. Search by issue, discipline, resource type and characteristic.
  • FairTrade Canada advocates for thriving farmer and worker communities that have more control over their futures. They stand in solidarity with producer organizations, without compromise, to their standards, prices, or vision to make trade work for everyone along the supply chain. Their impact is economic, social and environmental. 
  • Read the Feminist International Assistance Policy report from Global Affairs Canada. It describes helping to eradicate poverty and vulnerability around the world with supports targeted to investments, partnerships, innovation and advocacy. 
  • Visit GapMinder to learn about Dollar Street. Imagine the world as a street ordered by income with the poorest living to the left and the richest to the right with everybody else somewhere in between. Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. They fight devastating misconceptions about global development with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. They produce free teaching resources based on reliable statistics. They collaborate with universities, UN-based organizations, public agencies and non-governmental organizations.
  • Visit GeoGuesser to explore the world. It assists with Gamification in the classroom, where you are dropped somewhere in the world on a street view panorama, with the mission of finding clues and guessing your location on the world map.
  • Find Geospatial data and timely data sets for countries around the world by SDG.
  • Visit If It Were My Home an interactive map that helps people understand life outside of their home country. Use the country comparison tool to compare living conditions in a home country to those of another.
  • Visit Learning for Justice to view classroom resources, film kits, student tasks, and teaching strategies. The learning outcomes are divided into four domains—Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action. Resources include the New LGBTQ Best Practices Guide.
  • Visit Newsela for instructional content for ELA, Social Studies and Science including guides, success stories, webinars and blogs. 
  • Visit the News Literacy Project (NLP) a nonpartisan national education nonprofit. It provides programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy. 
  • Visit Off2Class for ESL instructors. They have lessons, teaching tools and video resources with personalized content that can be used in a variety of ways for a diverse range of learners.
  • Visit Reimagine Sustainability to find resources and articles to help you become a change agent and apply sustainability principles in your life as teacher or student through concept, mindset and action.
  • Visit the SDG Academy Library for free, open educational resources. Content includes ECE, Education for Sustainable Development, Education Policy, Higher Education and Primary and Secondary Education and can be searched by language, SDG, series and subject.
  • The SDG Knowledge Hub: A Project by The International Institute for Sustainable Development has content for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
  • TeachSDGs helps instructors to connect to the SDGs through resources such as videos, global projects, social media and teacher connections. 
  • Read the Canadian Bureau of International Education’s (CBIE) report on Advancing the SDGs at Universities.
  • Read Education for Sustainable Development: Case Study Guide for Educators report from Sustainable Development Solutions Network 2022. It showcases educators around the world who have successfully incorporated Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in their lessons and activities. This case-study guide summarizes lessons learned for educators, teachers, school leadership, and policymakers. 
  • Read the Indigenous Leadership Action Team report called ‘Prioritizing Indigenous Leadership to Advance the SDGs in Nogojiwanong Peterborough’. It provides an Indigenous perspective on several SDGs and links to advancing reconciliation while achieving the 2030 agenda. 
  • Read the report Teaching and Learning Indigenous Languages: Inspiring Practices from the UNESCO Associated Schools Network. The purpose of the publication is to inform and provide inspiration for educators for the teaching and learning of Indigenous languages. The document presents the synthesis of the survey responses, highlights compelling examples, and outlines promising approaches for the teaching and learning of Indigenous languages, along with the mainstreaming of Indigenous cultures, histories and knowledges, in schools worldwide.