Bridging the Disciplinary Divide: Promoting the Interdisciplinarity of Environmental Literacy in Teacher Education

Building knowledge, understanding, and advocacy for change in our environment is not just a topic for the science discipline but for every classroom, community, and individual.Because of that, environmental literacy is a pedagogy and practice that should be approached through leveraging interdisciplinarity as a teaching and training model.This paper reviews national, regional, and state initiatives around environmental literacy in the K-12 and higher education classrooms, highlighting the value of interdisciplinary environmental literacy and outlining a professional learning model.The Higher Education Environmental Literacy (HEEL) fellowship is a professional learning model focusing on capacity-building for a population often underrepresented in environmental literacy professional learning initiatives: teacher education faculty.By detailing the HEEL professional learning model, we describe strategies and educational experiences to promote engagement with environmental literacy through an interdisciplinary lens and share perspectives from HEEL faculty fellows.