By Bryan Lake, Logan Pender, and Carine Verschueren
The Sustainability Education Certificate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a graduate-level program designed for educators, researchers, and professionals seeking to better understand and respond to today’s environmental and social challenges. Offered fully online through EPOL, the certificate explores sustainability not only as an environmental issue, but also as a question of education, justice, community, and collective futures.
Through coursework that engages global and local sustainability issues, including climate change, Indigenous perspectives, and community engagement, the program invites students to reflect critically on how education can respond to a rapidly changing world. Bryan Lake and Logan Pender recently completed the certificate requirements during their Master’s degree programs in Global Studies in Education. We invited them to reflect on their experiences, key takeaways, and how the program shaped their thinking and practice.
Below are their responses.
What motivated you to enroll in the Sustainability Education Certificate?
Bryan: Prior to a recent return to graduate school, I spent 20+ years in K-12 public education spaces modeling more nature-based and inter-disciplinary and inquiry-based teaching and learning. My efforts were also in resistance of the overly standardized and scripted methods that tend to treat education as a factory/delivery model. These methods only reinforce a distance between the prescribed, standard knowledge and the joyful and more practical opportunities that exist outside of classroom walls, in community with nature, and in response to lived experiences and needs. I believe it is out there, where we build the lasting partnerships and reinforce the kinds of learning that lead to addressing more of the problems of a climate crisis and the impacts on our communities. In the K-12 space, I was fighting a losing battle and needed another route to keep working for change.
Logan: What motivated me to enroll in the Sustainability Education Certificate was a growing recognition that sustainability is not simply an environmental concern; it is deeply entangled with systems of power, knowledge production, and global inequities. Through my work in international education and education abroad, I began to see how mobility, access, and learning are unevenly distributed, often reproducing the very disparities sustainability efforts seek to address. I was searching for a framework that would allow me to critically interrogate these intersections while also equipping me with tools to reimagine education as a force for collective and global responsibility. The certificate provided that space, one that connected sustainability to my broader commitments to decoloniality, cultural symbiosis, and education as a global common good. In many ways, it helped me move from asking what sustainability is, who it serves, and how it is practiced.
What was one idea, concept, or experience from the program that has stayed with you? Or what was a highlight of the program?
Logan: One idea that has stayed with me is the framing of sustainability as a shared, relational responsibility rather than an individual or technocratic solution. This fundamentally shifted how I think about education abroad, not as a neutral or inherently beneficial practice, but as a system embedded within ecological, social, and political consequences. A major highlight of the program was engaging with frameworks that challenged the assumption that sustainability is universally defined or experienced. Instead, I was pushed to ask more critical questions: whose knowledge counts, whose land is impacted, and who ultimately benefits or bears the cost. This aligns closely with decolonial perspectives that emphasize relationality and interconnectedness across people, land, and knowledge systems. That reframing continues to shape both my research and how I approach global learning spaces.
Bryan: During a course with Dr. Lindgren, where she created space and permission to wrestle with our own climate emotions and experiences with and in the natural world, I started to imagine a new way forward. Teachers in public schools are so often reminded that they are there for the students. They are expected to perform the script and be only a partial version of themselves in that role. If we are going to shift practice toward more truly embedded problem-based learning and climate action, teachers need permission to be whole, to dig into their own experiences, to unpack the limits of their own relationships with the natural world in order to find more authentic space to move forward.
How has the certificate influenced your thinking or practice around sustainability or climate change education?
Bryan: Through my work toward this certificate, I have gotten to explore Indigenous knowledge systems and land-based pedagogy where land and water and other non-human life are embraced as teachers and partners in much more relational and reciprocal ways than is often modeled in U.S. public schools with more Western/Colonial influence. I have also reached toward other more liberatory, community-engaged, and loving pedagogies that center joy, lived experiences, and serve to empower, particularly the most marginalized and most often overlooked in our school systems. There is so much knowledge that could inform better ways forward. We just need to connect more people, build a collective why, and model how!
Logan: The certificate has fundamentally reshaped how I approach sustainability and climate change education by grounding it in questions of governance, reciprocity, and accountability. It pushed me beyond surface-level inclusion of sustainability themes and toward a deeper interrogation of the systems and structures that underpin educational practices. In my work, this has translated into a stronger emphasis on designing education abroad programs that center on host communities, prioritize mutual benefit, and critically examine environmental impact. Research shows that while studying abroad can influence long-term sustainability attitudes and behaviors, these outcomes are complex and depend heavily on program design and context. This reinforced to me that sustainability cannot be an add-on; it must be intentionally embedded. It has also deepened my commitment to positioning education within a broader diplomatic and ethical framework, which I describe as education-smart diplomacy, where sustainability becomes a guiding principle for how we engage across borders, rather than an afterthought.
Who would you recommend this certificate to, and why?
Logan: I would recommend this certificate to educators, researchers, and practitioners who are ready to move beyond treating sustainability as a buzzword and instead engage with it as a complex, systemic issue. It is especially valuable for those working in global or intercultural contexts, where questions of power, access, and impact are unavoidable. The coursework challenges you to critically reflect on your own positionality and to consider how your work contributes to disrupting existing inequities. For those involved in education abroad or international programs, this is particularly important, as these initiatives can produce both benefits and harms for host communities depending on how they are structured. For anyone committed to shaping more ethical, accountable, and globally conscious educational practices, the certificate offers both the intellectual foundation and the critical challenge needed to do that work meaningfully.
Bryan: While I was completing this certificate, I was also teaching a section of pre-service elementary teachers in a course that was designed around equity-centered, culturally sustaining, and trauma-informed practices with project-based learning as a tool for change and disruption. It was a great bridge from my certificate work to the work they are just beginning, and I kept finding ways to challenge them. How can you connect that to land? Where does that idea or unit plan provide opportunity for more authentic application in or through an available natural space? How will you continue to build upon that? I think we need to shift all education degree programs to embed this certificate and then some!
Next year Bryan continues his research in the Sustainable Futures Lab by pursuing a PhD. Logan will begin a PhD program in Higher Education at the University of Arizona.
Congratulations Logan and Bryan!