Joy O’Neil, University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, Director and Assistant Professor, Educational Sustainability Doctoral Program

Joy graduated with her Ph.D. in Sustainability Education from Prescott College. Her undergraduate and Master’s degrees are in Environmental Science from Northern Arizona University and Water Resources Management from the University of New Mexico. As the inaugural Director of the Educational Sustainability Doctoral Program (Ed.D.) at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point (UWSP), she leads in the development and execution of the program. In her program development capacity, she designs the program and curriculum to align with signature artifacts and competencies to meet sustainability education outcomes that has been accredited by the North Central Higher Learning Commission. As Assistant Professor in the program, her teaching and/or curriculum development includes: Reorienting Curriculum and Programs for a Sustainable Future, Transformative Sustainability Teaching and Learning, and Ecological Foundations for a Sustainable Society. Key to her design thinking for curriculum and program leadership centers on ecological principles of diversity, partnerships, networks, development, energy, cycles, and dynamic balance. Her current research and writing focuses on transformative sustainability education and ecological systems thinking within educational systems for socio-ecological change. She is on the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Associate Editor for the Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education, and was Co-editor of the Special Issue: Transformative Sustainability Education for the Journal of Transformative Education. She served as a participating member of a multidisciplinary task force to propose a new School of Sustainability at UWSP, with a focus on graduate programming in sustainability education and has recently been appointed to the Advisory Council for AASHE in which she serves on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and the Curriculum Committee. She is also an independent educational sustainability consultant (www.thejoyofsustainability.com<http://www.thejoyofsustainability.com>).

Paula DeHart, University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, Professor of Education

Paula graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Curriculum and Instruction, with emphases in Social Studies Education and Educational Technology. Over the past twenty-five years, she has taught undergraduate courses in Social Studies Methods and Educational Assessment, as well as graduate courses in the Fundamentals of Curriculum, Backward Design, and Research Methods. DeHart has extensive experience working with K-12 school districts on curriculum development using Understanding by Design, and has also served as the campus Assessment Coordinator at UW-Stevens Point. For the past two years, she has been collaborating with Dr. Joy O’Neil, Director of the Educational Sustainability Doctoral Program, co-teaching an Introduction to Doctoral Studies course, facilitating a doctoral mentorship course, and serving on doctoral committees.