By Jen Lamy, Associate Director of Sustainability
Last week, Emerson College hosted its second annual Teach In On Sustainability. Over three days, students, faculty, staff, and guests came together to discuss Emerson’s role in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
This year’s theme was sustainability jobs and careers. What kinds of jobs might Emerson graduates target in the sustainability space and how can our entire community embed sustainability into our daily work?
The Teach In featured filmmaker and activist Lydia Dean Pilcher as the keynote speaker. During her dynamic talk, Lydia shared inspiring insight into not only how productions can be more environmentally responsible, but also into how sustainability stories can be woven into the narratives coming out of Hollywood and beyond. Embracing sustainability operations is an important step, but it’s not the end of the story. To achieve the collective action needed from our global community to ensure “peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and in the future” (as stated in the UN SDG context), we need stories that educate, inspire, and empower all of us as individuals and communities.
Throughout the three days, Lydia also screened her film Homing Instinct in an installation at the Huret & Spector Gallery. She and author Dani McClain, who wrote the short story upon which the film was based, shared a fascinating conversation in a gallery talk with Emerson journalism professor and artist, Lina Giraldo, about climate change displacement, collaboration, and the meaning of home.
Throughout the week, the Emerson community had the chance to actively participate in several workshops, from Finding, Getting, and Keeping a Green Job presented by the Green Jobs Board (featuring Kristy Drutman and our very own Samantha Silveira ’22) and climate communications strategist Nicole Loher to a Climate Lens Workshop with the organization Good Energy. The learning continued with not one but two alumni panels, one from folks working at the intersection of government and sustainability and the other featuring recent alumni working on sustainability from several different angles.
Members of the Emerson community and guests also had the opportunity to share their own stories that relate to sustainability, often in unexpected ways. Monday night’s Sustainable Soiree featured an open mic — we heard the voices of about a dozen different individuals who shared songs and poetry about their homes, the environment around them, coping with change, and more. We were also treated to a screening of two fabulous films that concluded the three-day event: one from filmmaker Pedro de Filippis and the other from current MFA student Zayan Agha.
In addition to these events (and many more!), the Teach In was anchored by several open classes, where faculty invited the entire community to join them in the classroom to learn about sustainability from several different perspectives. From campus sustainability project proposals to a Feldenkrais Method workshop, we all gained a more holistic understanding of sustainability and what it means to dedicate our lives to this work.
If you missed the event, take a look at the agenda and photos below from last week and get excited for next year!
