Toolkit for the Interdisciplinary Infusion of the SDGs into Classrooms

Health

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

Featured Video: Kinesiology and Climate Change

Dr. Liv Yoon, Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, member of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and member of the Mobilizing Sport and Sustainability Collective, discusses how kinesiology has the potential to make unique contributions to informing responses to the climate crisis, and promoting climate justice.

This video was produced with UBC Studios, with particular thanks to Chris Spencer. Many thanks also to UBC School of Kinesiology faculty members Drs. Erica Bennett, Andrea Bundon, Janice Forsyth, Moss Norman, and Brian Wilson, who provided input on the script.

This video was part of the ‘Kin(esiology) in Climate: Health Stories from Our Shared City’ project (Principal Investigator: Liv Yoon; Co-Investigators: Brian Wilson, Andrea Bundon), supported by the Climate & Wellbeing Education Grant from UBC Sustainability and UBC Wellbeing.

Featured Video: Local Stories of Climate and Wellbeing

Ms. Yang, a resident of a subsidized housing building for seniors, shares her experiences of extreme temperatures in Vancouver as they intersect with other dimensions of her and her neighbours’ lives.

This video was produced with UBC Studios, with particular thanks to Chris Spencer. Many thanks also to Abby Zhou, undergraduate kinesiology student, who facilitated with coordinating, interviewing, and translating.

This video was part of the ‘Kin(esiology) in Climate: Health Stories from Our Shared City’ project (Principal Investigator: Liv Yoon; Co-Investigators: Brian Wilson, Andrea Bundon), supported by the Climate & Wellbeing Education Grant from UBC Sustainability and UBC Wellbeing.

  • 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.
  • Read the Forced to Flee lesson plan. The learning objective is to transform thinking and inspire action around conflict, migration, and refugees.
  • Visit Gender-Inclusive Biology. Educators, parents, guardians, and students are asking questions that society is still struggling to answer. Students anywhere on the gender spectrum directly feel the effects of how we answer and what we do not answer. This website aims to curate resources and connect science educators, students, learners of all types, parents, guardians, and everyone involved in supporting and learning to grow a more inclusive biology curriculum.
  • 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 Wakelet SDG page for lesson plans, links, videos, student challenges, activities, infographics and tasks for all of the 17 SDGs.
  • The Sustainable Development Goals Fund has an online database of sustainable development case studies with a selection of effective practices on how to achieve a sustainable world while advancing 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 Alliance 2030 a national network committed to achieving the 17 goals especially in Canada by working at local and global levels. Their Economics page contains content related to a number of SDGs, including no poverty, decent work and economic growth, industry, innovation and infrastructure.
  • 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.
  • Visit BioRender, the world’s first tool to help scientists create and share professional, visual, accessible and universal scientific figures. They believe that science is universally communicated and understood through visuals. Science communication should always be fast, repeatable and standardized.
  • 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. 
  • 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.
  • 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 to those of another.
  • Kinesiology and Climate Change Dr. Liv Yoon,

 Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, member of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice, and member of the Mobilizing Sport and Sustainability Collective, discusses how kinesiology has the potential to make unique contributions to informing responses to the climate crisis, and promoting climate justice.

 This video was produced with UBC Studios, with particular thanks to Chris Spencer. Many thanks also to UBC School of Kinesiology faculty members Drs. Erica Bennett, Andrea Bundon, Janice Forsyth, Moss Norman, and Brian Wilson, who provided input on the script.

This video was part of the ‘Kin(esiology) in Climate: Health Stories from Our Shared City’ project (Principal Investigator: Liv Yoon; Co-Investigators: Brian Wilson, Andrea Bundon), supported by the Climate & Wellbeing Education Grant from UBC Sustainability and UBC Wellbeing.

  • TeachSDGs helps instructors to connect to the SDGs through resources such as videos, global projects, social media and teacher connections. 
  • Visit The WHO for information related to a variety of health topics.
  • Visit the SDG Academy Library for free, open educational resources. Health content including Public Health, Food and Nutrition and Wellness can be searched by language, SDG, series and subject.
  • Visit the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems a thematic network that aims to connect experts and practitioners to turn knowledge into practice for SDG 2. There are projects, reports, recent work and publications. 
  • Read the American Journal of Nursing article titled ‘Nursing and the Sustainable Development Goals: From Nightingale to Now’. By Dossey, Rosa and Beck from May 2019 – Volume 119 – Issue 5. This article explores how nurses can contextualize the SDGs within their daily practice and create holistic plans of care for patients, families, communities, and nations.
  • Read the British Medical Bulletin article titled ‘Sustainable Development Goals and their implementation: A national global framework for health, development and equity needs a systems approach at every level’.
  • Read the 2021 Global Nutrition Report. It provides a concise data-focused update on the state of diets and nutrition in the world.
  • 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. 
  • View the report by The National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health titled ‘The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Indigenous People in Canada’. The report aims to assess the current state of progress of the SDG targets for Indigenous peoples and suggest ways that the SDG agenda can be used to improve socio-economic, and health outcomes. 
  • Read the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing article titled ‘Nursing and Sustainable Development: Furthering the Global Agenda in Uncertain Times’. By Rosa, Beck and Dossey from May 31, 2019, Vol. 24, No. 2, Manuscript 1. 
  • Read the 2020 TReNDS’ report titled ‘Innovations in Disease Surveillance and Monitoring: Chapter in Springer Handbook of Global Health’. 
  • Read the WHO’s UHC Compendium: Repository of interventions for universal health coverage report. It includes interventions that will facilitate progress on a range of targets across multiple SDGs.