EdD in Educational and Professional Practice: Environmental Sustainability Education
Location: AU Online
Credits for Degree: 60 semester credits
Standard Mode of Instruction: Low-residency
Standard time to completion: 36 months
Program Overview
The Ed.D. program prepares change-oriented scholar-practitioners committed to advancing more just, inclusive, and sustainable schools, organizations, and communities. Through a transdisciplinary approach, the program integrates theory and practice through shared seminars, applied inquiry, and individualized specialization, enabling students to address complex challenges related to equity, ethics, leadership, and social justice
Students specialize in one of the following transdisciplinary areas of inquiry: Critical Pedagogy; Environmental and Sustainability Education; Humane Education; Multicultural and Anti-Racist Education; Social Emotional Learning; Social Justice Leadership; Waldorf Education; or Self-Designed.
Specializations may include seminars, individualized study, and opportunities to take courses across Antioch University programs. Students may also transfer approved graduate credits in alignment with program requirements. Each student’s dissertation will fall within the chosen specialization.
The program culminates in a Practice-Based Dissertation that establishes students as scholar-practitioners who design and implement meaningful, research-informed solutions to complex challenges in schools, organizations, communities, and national and global contexts.
Environmental and Sustainability Specialization
The Environmental and Sustainability Education Specialization allows students to conduct in-depth inquiry into currently pressing questions about the relationship between our professional practices, the land base and natural resources required to sustain these practices, as well as the larger sets of law, policy, and normalized procedure that organize and orient these practices systematically in either more or less sustainable forms. Students may conduct research into their practice as such relates to, for example: Macrosystem ecocrises such as climate destabilization, planetary mass extinction, food and water system insecurities or issues of social/environmental toxicology; Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge; place-based and other contemporary frameworks for environmental and ecological literacy; globalization and the normalization of a mass consumer society, etc. Formal educational practitioners might consider practice-based questions related generally to instituting “Sustainability Across the Curriculum” or transdisciplinary forms of Environmental Education. Other professionals might conduct action research into how their organizational practices further or limit the possibilities of corporate social responsibility. Additionally, grassroots environmental activists might reflect deeply upon the design and outcomes of their educational campaigns and the ways in which the organizations and their membership themselves can better learn to “walk their talk” on behalf of social, economic, and environmental justice.
The specialization may be composed of seminars and individualized study. You may also choose to take courses in other Antioch programs and to transfer in credits from previous graduate work. Each student’s dissertation topic will fall within their chosen specialization.
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