A team consisting of members from the Teachers College Sustainability Task Force (STF), Teachers College Decolonization Study Group (DSG), and Teachers College Center for Sustainable Futures (CSF) was recently awarded a grant from The Vice President’s Grant for Diversity and Community Initiative (DCI). Darren Rabinowitz, Noa Urbach,  Sarah Lewis, and Claudia Hui co-wrote the proposal titled Discourse for Decarbonization and Decolonization. This campus-wide event will be hosted in the Spring of 2023 will invite two faculty members to converse at the intersection of sustainability, decolonization, and their respective research areas. Unique to this event will be the engagement portion. After the moderated faculty dialogue, attendees will break up into multi-stakeholder groups (students will be mixed with faculty, administrators, and facilities within these groups) to unpack topics inspired by the discussion between the faculty members and, ultimately, set goals as to how each group will carry new understandings into their respective fields of influence; within and outside of TC.

Below you can read the grant proposal: 

Amidst the innumerable ambitions and initiatives pursued each day at Teachers College, it is easy to forget the string which ties us together: a recognition of injustice and imbalance, and an interest in bettering the future through education. And yet, despite the clarity of our vision, many of the most critical problems we face are deeply, sometimes intractably complex. Nowhere is this complexity more apparent than at the juncture of sustainability and the legacy of colonialism.  If our aim is to make real and meaningful change, we must have the courage to engage this complexity and work through community-focused discourse. 

From John Dewey to Paolo Freire, dialogue is the heart of our most cherished pedagogies. Today though, we seem to have lost faith in its potential, or simply abandoned it from fatigue.  For this reason, we propose hosting a cross-disciplinary conversation, bringing together two professors from seemingly opposite perspectives, around questions fundamental to the efforts of decarbonization and decoloniality.

We’ve no interest in inflaming for sport. Our aim is real change, which demands we challenge ourselves to keep learning more, differently, and better. To this end, we want to bring questions of deep complexity at the moral and mechanical level, about issues of urgent, material significance to those lives most impacted by a broken system. More specifically, this event will invite stakeholders from across the college to consider, engage and create actionable goals, stemming from decarbonization and decolonization to implement within their domain of influence at Teachers College. 

Finally, while we can all pursue such questions by ourselves, we don’t dismiss the weight of being vulnerable to new things, to not knowing, or to being uncertain. While we are lucky to all have each other, for strength, support, and perspective, we believe in doing this work as a community to build stronger bridges between students, faculty, facilities and administrators in the name of generative democratic discourse. It is within Teachers College we can imagine and build methods and pathways toward the impact we wish to make internally, at the College, and externally, whether that be our communities outside the college or in our future work and lives. 

Congratulations Darren, Noa, Sara, and Claudia!