Toolkit for the Interdisciplinary Infusion of the SDGs into Classrooms

Math and Statistics

The following resources will provide instructors with materials to support, introduce and infuse the SDGs into their lessons.

General

  • 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 the SDG Academy Library for free, open educational resources. Content can be searched by language, SDG, series and subject.
  • Visit the Wakelet SDG page for lesson plans, links, videos, student challenges, activities, infographics and tasks for all of the 17 SDGs.

Applied Mathematics

Pure Mathematics

View the Resources and Ideas for Math related to infusing SDGs #13 and #15. Content includes models, simulators, laboratory activities and lesson plans. Topics include:

algebra

calculus

integration

differentiation

trigonometry

polynomial differentiation

Riemann sums

Statistical Mathematics

numerical modeling

trend analysis

linear regression

quadratic regression

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.

  • Learning Math by Seeing It as a Story is an innovative co-teaching strategy that encourages students to conceptualize trigonometry problems through storytelling, making math more accessible and engaging. Related SDGs: Quality Education (SDG 4).

More Case Studies

  • 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, along with a selection of effective practices on how to achieve a sustainable world and advance the 17 SDGs.

  • 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 the Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education for a breakdown of the event Realigning Curricula for the Future: Mathematics and Sustainability. Attendees heard examples of good practice when embedding sustainability in the mathematics curriculum, discussed their own experience of embedding ESD and had the opportunity to reflect on how their curriculum represents the SDGs in a mapping activity. Watch the event on YouTube.
  • Visit Alliance 87, an organization specifically focused on Target 8.7 while 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.
  • Visit Citizen Math where instructors can help students connect to the world and develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills for important issues faced by society. They provide supplemental math lessons with an immersive and participatory approach.
  • Visit the Data Hub of The Government of Canada. It is the focal point for reporting Canada’s data for the SDG indicators. They partner with many councils and organizations and include all 17 goals and some features are Gender, Diversity and Inclusion statistics, Human Activity and the Environment as examples. 

  • View the Education Scotland Excel spreadsheet for STEM and SDG resources searchable by sector, theme, provider, opportunity, region, authority, month and year.
  • 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. They have an economic, social and environmental impact.
  • Visit GapMinder to learn about Dollar Street. Imagine the world as a street ordered by income. The poorest live to the left and the richest to the right while everybody else lives 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.
  • Find Geospatial data and timely data sets for countries around the world by SDG.
  • Visit GeoGebra a dynamic mathematics software for all levels of education that brings together geometry, algebra, spreadsheets, graphing, statistics and calculus in one engine. It is open-source software and includes many free resources.
  • The Global Footprint Network supports the shift towards a sustainable economy by advancing the Ecological Footprint, a measurement and management tool that makes the reality of global limits central to decision-making.  Ecological footprint projects can be an effective way to get students to think about how sustainability intersects with their lives.
  • 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 versus another.
  • Visit Our World in Data for maps that demonstrate areas of water stress as well as freshwater resources over time and use by region and country. 
  • Visit Our World in Data  for a visual representation of environmental impacts of food production, land use, and carbon emissions. 
  • The POPGRID Data Collaborative aims to bring together and expand the international community of data providers, users, and sponsors concerned with georeferenced data on population, human settlements and infrastructure. They seek to improve data access, timeliness, consistency, and utility; support data use and interpretation; identify and address pressing user needs; reduce duplication and user confusion; and encourage innovation and cross-disciplinary use. They bring expertise and perspectives from diverse natural, social, health, and engineering science disciplines and sectors, and from government, academia, private industry, and nongovernmental organizations. 
  • Visit Stanford University for data that shows the projected impact of climate change on economies by country. 
  • TeachSDGs helps instructors to connect to the SDGs through resources such as videos, global projects, social media and teacher connections. 

  • Explore Mathkind’s Global Math Stories, where educators can engage students with real-world narratives that enhance critical thinking and problem-solving skills. These stories offer immersive, participatory math lessons that connect classroom learning to diverse cultures and global contexts.

  • Read TReNDS’ 2021 report titled ‘Towards A Framework For Governing Data Innovation: Fostering Trust In The Use Of Non-Traditional Data Sources In Statistical Production’.