The participants held varied titles, including director of sustainability, energy manager, special projects coordinator, career technical education director, school board member, specialist, coordinator and officer. Most were organizationally based in facilities or operations. Sixteen participants identified as women and four as men; 18 identified as white, one as American Indian or Alaska Native, and two as Asian or Asian-American. Fourteen participants had more than 10 years of professional experience in sustainability, while 17 were older than 35. The districts represented several regions, including the Southeast, West, Southwest, Northeast, Northwest and Midwest, and ranged from small rural systems to large urban districts.

The interview data had originally been collected for a dissertation about how K–12 district leaders made sense of sustainability and how their interpretations shaped institutional activism. This secondary analysis used transformative learning theory to examine whether higher-education experiences altered fixed assumptions and broadened participants’ perspectives. Transformative learning was described as a process that makes reference frames more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective and emotionally capable of change. The analysis combined deductive coding informed by sensemaking and institutional activism with inductive themes that emerged from participants’ narratives. Trustworthiness measures included peer debriefing, an audit trail of documents and protocols, detailed memoing, and member-checking of emerging interpretations with participants.

Eighty percent of the 20 leaders had completed an undergraduate degree in a sustainability-related field, including science or environmental subjects, before entering K–12 education. None of the participants reported studying education as part of that degree path. Even when sustainability was not their declared major, some said their broader course of study taught them to view environmental issues as interconnected. Evelyn, a sustainability director in a large urban district, linked systems thinking and critical thinking to her geology background. Samantha’s public-health training led her to treat sustainability as integral to public health rather than as a separate field. Such accounts suggest that the disciplinary framing of a degree, not simply the presence of a sustainability label, helped some participants understand environmental problems as connected to wider institutional and community systems.

Student organizations and campus activism provided another route into sustainability leadership. Chelsea, a district sustainability director in a large western urban district, said she began by leading a sustainability club at her alma mater. The group raised $250,000 and installed a 7,000-square-foot green roof, an experience she said propelled her toward sustainability work in education and showed her the influence students could have. Karen participated in student government that helped write a university sustainability policy, secure the university’s first sustainability director, install the first recycling bins and change campus practices. She described being inspired by the durability of those changes and by work directed toward a community rather than an individual. In these accounts, students moved from learning about sustainability to practicing collective action within an institution.

Individual courses also altered how some participants understood both the problem and their possible professional role. Michael recalled taking “Human Impact on the Earth,” a course that combined cultural geography with human history and examined how environmental impacts grew through industrialization. He said it was the first time he recognized sustainability as a major issue and began asking how he could explore it further. His response to that question eventually led him into K–12 education. Chelsea similarly described an environmental science course, taken partly because she enjoyed the outdoors, and a professor who, she said, fundamentally changed her life. Participants more generally credited instructors, guest speakers and opportunities that linked ideas to practice for shaping their environmental outlook and the approaches they later used in district work.

Not all transformative experiences occurred in a classroom or campus club. Study-abroad and volunteer programs placed some participants in international, service-oriented or place-based settings. Daisy said study abroad during her study of water-treatment techniques changed the trajectory of her thinking about sustainability. Karen described immersion and volunteer trips in the United States and Mexico, including Hurricane Katrina relief work, as something that “brought out the activist” in her and prompted further campus sustainability activity. For these participants, experiences beyond the conventional degree curriculum exposed them to environmental conditions and community action in different places. The findings concern how participants interpreted and remembered these experiences; they do not establish that a specific course, travel program, club or residential arrangement caused a later career outcome.

After entering K–12 education, the leaders developed initiatives including green “champion” educator programs, sustainability-certified diploma pathways for students, district solar-energy credits that lowered energy bills for surrounding communities, expanded shade canopy at schools, and transitions of school bus fleets toward electric vehicles. The research did not quantify the effects of these initiatives, and it included no comparison group demonstrating that higher-education experiences alone produced the results. Most participants also described public-school bureaucracy as a hindrance to progress, emphasizing that knowledge of sustainability must be accompanied by an understanding of the specialized rules, institutional barriers and operational demands of school districts. The study documents participants’ professional accounts rather than a controlled evaluation of leadership preparation.

Based on the interviews, the researcher proposes closer connections between sustainability programs and educational leadership preparation. Suggested options include sustainability concentrations in educational leadership degrees, courses addressing whole-school sustainability and green organizational management, internships, and academic experiences that connect fields often taught through separate pathways. Universities might also provide sustainability-focused options for education leaders, while sustainability professionals entering schools might study the specific context of educational organizations. These are proposed preparation pathways, not interventions tested in the research, and the report did not compare formal programs or measure their effects. Its limitations include a sample of only 20 participants, demographic imbalance, possible effects of snowball sampling, and the interpretive subjectivity of its critical-constructivist approach.

Climate-related hazards such as wildfires, hurricanes, flooding and heat waves have disrupted schooling and affected learning, placing climate adaptation among the responsibilities of educational leaders. The interviews show how practicing district professionals connected university experiences to later sustainability work: degree fields supplied systems perspectives, courses introduced major questions, campus activism demonstrated collective action, and international or volunteer experiences connected environmental concerns to place and community. The evidence does not show that any single educational experience reliably creates a sustainability leader, nor does it demonstrate how schools responded because of those experiences. Instead, the research identifies experiences that 20 established professionals regarded as meaningful. Their accounts support testing more deliberate preparation pathways, while also showing that any such pathway must address the organizational complexity that sustainability leaders encounter inside public school systems.

Subject of Research: How higher-education experiences relate to K–12 district sustainability leadership careers

Article Title: Transformational experiences in higher education: sustainability for educational leaders

Article References: Spitzer, N. (2026). Transformational experiences in higher education: sustainability for educational leaders. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1958750. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1958750

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1958750

Keywords: higher education, K–12 education, sustainability leadership, school districts, climate adaptation, student activism, environmental education, qualitative interviews, educator preparation, transformative learning, Transformational, experiences