Connecting Sustainability and Student Learning at the 2026 AASHE Conference

By Daniel Esposito
Office of Sustainability Program Assistant 

Recently I attended a conference for sustainability in higher education, and though it was my third time attending this event, this year was different from the rest. My first two times at the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference, I attended as a staff member from Loyola University Maryland. This time I was representing Tufts as a staff member, graduate student, and first-time AASHE presenter.

AASHE is primarily known for their Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS), which prompts institutions to report a wide range of metrics to inform and improve their sustainability performance. STARS measures everything from building emissions, how many sustainability-related courses the institution offers, how many students participate in community service, and a lot more. The program is used by over 400 institutions, including Tufts, which earned a STARS Gold rating in 2022.

AASHE also hosts this yearly conference to facilitate community building and co-learning in the field of higher education sustainability, typically drawing over 800 sustainability professionals. This year I was co-presenting on a panel with sustainability staff from Northeastern, Allegheny College, and Johns Hopkins, facilitated by Ann Ward — a fellow Tufts Office of Sustainability staff member. Our panel focused on how sustainability offices can demonstrate their value and function to the rest of the institution by aligning with their broad strategic mission through experiential learning.

Sustainability teams at colleges and universities are great at experiential learning — living labs, campus as classroom-type programs that pair students with real issues their university or community is facing and give them time and space to work on a solution. We argued that the step that sustainability professionals can sometimes miss is in describing this work as experiential learning, and explicitly connecting it to the institutional mission, which for every institute has a basis of educating and preparing students.

My part of the panel highlighted our office’s Sustainable Spring program, the one-credit course we offer through Tufts Experimental College. I helped redesign this course to better emphasize experiential learning, which better aligned our office’s work to Tufts’ Beyond 175 strategic plan. This framing helps demonstrate that we share a path forward with our institution, even if we’re not all Office of Sustainability staff.

Leading up to the presentation, I was fairly stressed. As a young professional and first-time presenter, it felt like a big moment for my career. I felt like the overall concept of our panel was pretty profound and want to do it and my fellow panelists justice. The conference also holds multiple presentations at once, so turnout was a huge question mark. Thankfully, it was standing-room only. The presentation ended up being extremely well attended and, based on the questions asked in our Q&A section, folks were really engaged, which showed me that our message really resonated with folks.

As someone interested in working in higher education sustainability long-term, the networking opportunity was especially valuable. The first few formal times I networked in my career, including at early AASHE conferences, I was mostly focused on meeting lots of new people and learning as much as I could about the field. This being my third AASHE conference allowed me to shift this approach towards deepening existing relationships — something only possible once the early relationships are established. Alongside making some new connections, getting to catch up and co-learn with people I’ve met previously made this year’s conference a unique experience for me, and I’m excited to leverage those connections in my work here at Tufts.