Draft:Charles Alexander Hopkins



Charles Alexander (Chuck) Hopkins was born in 1940 in Parry Sound (ON), Canada. Today, he lives in Toronto.

Following a career in formal education with the Toronto District School Board including positions as the principal of the Toronto Island School and the Boyne River Natural Science School, as a regional school superintendent and as superintendent of curriculum, he has been holding the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability at York University in Toronto, Canada since 1999.

This Chair, established in 1999, was the first to focus on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) as a central concept to quality education and to position sustainability as a purpose of education. Hopkins coordinates two global ESD research networks, the International Network of Teacher Education Institutions and the #IndigenousESD. The first network is comprised of teacher education institutions spanning 50 countries and focuses on enhancing ESD in pre-service and in-service teacher training. The INTEI network became known for its recommendations on how to reorient teacher education to infuse sustainability in 2005. The second network covering 40 countries aims to embed sustainability in curricula to improve the education of Indigenous youth. Today, ESD is recognized as a key enabler in the pursuit of sustainable development and Hopkins has played a significant role in its global conceptual development and implementation.

Hopkins has a long relationship with education and sustainability, ranging from early speeches promoting Outdoor Education in the 1960s to international involvement in developing Environmental Education to chairing the writing and adoption processes of two global UNESCO ESD Declarations: the Bonn Declaration on ESD (2009) and the Aichi-Nagoya Declaration on ESD (2014).

As part of the UN preparation for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Hopkins was one of the drafters of Chapter 36 of Agenda 21: Education, Public Awareness and Training. Hopkins has been a part of much of UNESCO's efforts to develop education for sustainable development. In addition to his work with UNESCO, he worked closely with the United Nations University to be one of the original developers of the UNU-IAS Regional Centers of Expertise in ESD where he was instrumental in creating more than 25 RCEs in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

One of his most important Canadian achievements was organizing and chairing the ECO-ED Conference in Toronto in 1992, the first education conference following the Earth Summit in Brazil, today considered one of the 'Canadian milestones' in the efforts towards educating for sustainability. His important perspectives on how to education future generations for a sustainable future were recognized with a quote in the Accord on Education for a Sustainable Future, published by the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE) in 2022.

Following honorary doctorates from Uppsala University in Sweden (2006) and from Universidad Nacional de Trujillo in Peru (2011), he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Okayama University in Japan in 2019. In 2022, Charles received a Clean 50 Lifetime Achievement Award for his efforts in connecting education to business and industry in Canada and globally.

A personal anecdote that Charles likes to tell is that he safeguarded the Lithuanian treaties over several decades during the times of the Cold War and returned them to Lithuania in 2022. In the same year, he received the Lithuanian State Award on Statehood Day (July 6) from President of the Republic of Lithuania Gitanas Nausėda.