Achieving transformative sustainability learning: Engaging head, hands and

Purpose – The current UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development echoes many scholars’ calls to re-envision education for sustainability. Short of a complete overhaul of education, the paper seeks to propose learning objectives that can be integrated across existing curricula. These learning objectives are organized by head, hands and heart – balancing cognitive, psychomotor and affective domains. University programs and courses meeting these learning objectives exhibit an emergent property here termed transformative sustainability learning (TSL). Design/methodology/approach – Theoretically, TSL grew from traditions of sustainability education and transformative education. Practically, TSL emerged from experimental learning collaborations sponsored by the University of British Columbia in 2003 and 2004 in an effort to enable explicit transitions to sustainability-oriented higher education. Primarily through action research, these community-based, applied learning experiences constituted cyclical processes of innovation, implementation and reflection. Findings – The paper finds: advancement of head, hands and heart as an organizing principle by which to integrate transdisciplinary study (head); practical skill sharing and development (hands); an