Building a sustainable energy future, one community at a time

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present how teachers build capacity within a learning community. Two participant researchers, acting as facilitators and co-teachers in an Ontario elementary public school literacy initiative, applied a learning community model for professional development to determine its impact on teachers' capacity, and on students' standardized test scores. Data collection included meeting notes from weekly modelling sessions and biweekly learning community meetings, field logs, reflection statements from teachers and principal, and documents (such as team-constructed lesson plans and lesson materials). Findings indicated that the use of a learning community to promote collaborative planning, sharing of effective or best practices for teaching, and modelling of literacy components, was valued by teachers. As well, the collaborative learning experience encouraged teachers to take on increasing responsibilities for planning and delivering lessons, promoting a cohesive learning situation for students, as indicated by significantly improved standardized test scores as measured by the Education Quality and Accountability Office Test (EQAO Test), and staff attitudes towards the use of the learning community, as a means of professional development.

Money, not morale: The impact of desires and beliefs on private investment in photovoltaic citizen participation initiatives

“…Such initiatives are either founded by companies, allowing participants (e.g. as shareholders) to invest money, and thus facilitate community PV power plant operation (Bauwens et al, 2015;Klein and Coffey, 2016), or by private individuals or municipalities, characterized by e.g. participatory processes, shared benefits, or some kind of interest in encouraging renewable energy production (Dóci et al, 2015;Hargreaves et al, 2013;Seyfang et al, 2014).…”

A Community Energy Transition Model for Urban Areas: The Energy Self-Reliant Village Program in Seoul, South Korea

“…Studies of community energy parallel the locations of this activity, focusing especially on Northern European countries. Only a few examples in Asia have been investigated [10].…”

Community energy initiatives to alleviate fuel poverty: the material politics of Energy Cafés

“…Seyfang et al 2013, Seyfang et al 2014. Within this research, we focus on community energy and understand it to mean citizen-led activity in relation to sustainable energy projects (for a detailed discussion on the concept, see, for example, Klein and Coffey 2016). Current forms of grassroots innovations, such as community energy projects, are usually seen as pragmatic and investigated pragmatically (Hargreaves et al 2013, Smith et al 2016).…”