Toolkit for the Interdisciplinary Infusion of the SDGs into Classrooms

Social Sciences

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

  • 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, which creates educational resources while making 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.
  • Read the Forced to Flee lesson plan. The learning objective is to transform thinking and inspire action around conflict, migration, and refugees.
  • 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 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. 
  • Visit the Resources and Lessons for Social Sciences, which infuses SDGs #3, #5, #13, #16 and #17. Content includes curated audio, micro-lectures, lesson plans, videos and readings. Topics include refugees, environmental migration, climate justice, social vulnerability, urban climate resilience, climate change and behavior, climate change and children, agro-ecosystems, food security, human health and disease and climate change and cities. 
  • Read the lesson from The World’s Largest Lesson called ‘Challenging Common Conceptions: Seeing the Bigger Picture’ from the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, which is related to SDGs #9, #11 and #12.

  • Visit the Wakelet SDG page for lesson plans, links, videos, student challenges, activities, infographics and tasks for all of the 17 SDGs.
  • 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 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 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.
  • Read about The Big History Project, a social studies course that spans 13.8 billion years of history. It weaves insights from many disciplines to form a single story that helps us better understand people, civilizations, and how we are connected to everything around us.
  • 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 Canadian Geographic Education a standing committee of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. They offer teacher guides, lesson plans, giant floor maps, videos, infographics, maps & activities, and interactives.
  • Visit the Canadian Labour Congress. They help people to understand the issues facing workers in Canada including Indigenous and LGBTQ employees and employees of colour. They have economists, researchers and subject matter experts and produce in-depth analysis on issues such as working conditions, health and safety, wages and benefits, healthcare, pensions and retirement security. 
  • Visit NLP’s Checkology for lessons and resources to 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 DigCitCommitt to learn about teaching digital citizenship that encourages being inclusive, informed, engaged, balanced and alert.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The Land Portal Foundation was established to create, curate and disseminate land governance information by fostering an inclusive and accessible data landscape. Over the last decade, the portal has evolved from a simple information gateway to become a knowledge broker, a resource base, a vibrant online community of users and a trusted voice within global land governance.
  • 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. 
  • 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 the SDG Academy for free, open educational resources. Social Sciences content includes ECE, ethics, gender, history, philosophy, psychology and urban planning and 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. 
  • TeachSDGs helps instructors to connect to the SDGs through resources such as videos, global projects, social media and teacher connections. 

  • Explore CHF Canada’s blog post explaining SDGs’ importance and integration into organizational planning. This resource can foster discussions about how societies and communities can take action to support the SDGs.
  • 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. 

  • Read UNDP’s insightful blog post titled Re-thinking Disability Inclusion for the SDGs. The post critically examines the role of disability inclusion within the SDGs and explores strategies to ensure inclusivity. This valuable resource provides unique perspectives and strategies on how to better incorporate disability inclusion into our understanding and application of the SDGs.