Toolkit for the Interdisciplinary Infusion of the SDGs into Classrooms

Social Work

The following resources will provide instructors with materials to support, introduce and infuse the SDGs into their lessons.

  • Read the Child Brides: Stolen Lives lesson plan from the United States Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series NOW. It provides a startling insight into the issue of child brides in many developing countries. The production team travelled to Niger, India and Guatemala to report on a global custom that devastates lives and keeps communities from prospering.
  • View the lesson Climate Change Impacts on Mental Health. It provides an overview of several mental health consequences of global warming such as stress and distress symptoms and clinical disorders. It addresses how climate change and its impacts can affect the perceptions of everyday experiences and life of individuals and communities.
  • Read the Forced to Flee lesson plan. The learning objective is to transform thinking and inspire action around conflict, migration, and refugees.
  • View the lesson Stress and Coping with Climate Change than connects SDGs #3, #4 and #13.
  • Read Dr. Jason Watkins' study Hungry and Hesitant: An Exploration of the Experience of Stigma Among On-Campus Food Pantry Users . This phenomenological research was grounded in reflective lifeworld research and focused on college food insecurity through shared, lived experiences and noted three emerging themes and the strategies participants used to navigate the stigma. His findings can contribute towards informing best practices and creating strategies for administrators that promote inclusion and service utilization
  • Read Professor Julie Fish's case study titled SDGs and Social Work. She linked the SDGs to the profession of social work and local stakeholder networks via a conference event in the context of academic and practice learning.
  • The Sustainable Development Goals Fund has an online database of sustainable development case studies with a selection of effective practices on how to achieve a sustainable world and advance the 17 SDGs.
  • The Women in Coffee Project aims to create a platform for women who are leaders as coffee producers, importers, and exporters to offer their perspective in this complex industry.  It encourages independence and income for women coffee farmers in Kenya. Despite doing 70 per cent of the work growing coffee, many women are not given rights to what they grow.

  • Visit Alliance 87, an organization specifically focused on Target 8.7 and joining forces to provide educational resources, facts and graphics around ending forced labour, modern slavery, human trafficking and child labour around the world.
  • View A Rounder Sence of Purpose. It is a framework that has been designed for all educators, working at any level, who wish to provide an education for sustainable development. It includes 12 competencies in learning for sustainability.
  • Visit Faculty for a Future and search the Seed Library It is a searchable database of open-access educational resources that can support educators and students by integrating sustainability into discipline-specific teaching and learning. Search by issue, discipline, resource type and characteristic.
  • Read the Feminist International Assistance Policy report from Global Affairs Canada. It describes helping to eradicate poverty and vulnerability around the world with supports targeted to investments, partnerships, innovation and advocacy. 
  • Visit GapMinder to learn about Dollar Street. Imagine the world as a street ordered by income. The poorest live to the left and the richest to the right while everybody else lives somewhere in between. Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. They fight devastating misconceptions about global development with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. They produce free teaching resources based on reliable statistics. They collaborate with universities, UN organizations, public agencies and non-governmental organizations.
  • Visit If It Were My Home an interactive map that helps people understand life outside of their home country. Use the country comparison tool to compare living conditions in a home country to those of another.
  • Visit Learning for Justice to view classroom resources, film kits, student tasks, and teaching strategies. The learning outcomes are divided into four domains—Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action. Resources include the New LGBTQ Best Practices Guide.
  • TeachSDGs helps instructors to connect to the SDGs through resources such as videos, global projects, social media and teacher connections. 
  • Read the updated policy paper Social Work and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals published by the IFSW in 2021.