I’m currently preparing for several consulting projects where I’ll be supporting groups of teachers with developing their teaching to include a focus on sustainability competencies, so I am looking through what other people have done and what I can learn from that. Today, the “you have a part to play” toolkit for higher education for sustainability (Meerkerk, de Mul & Broekhaus; 2024).
The “you have a part to play” toolkit was developed and tested at Radboud university, and then made accessible to educators in the widest sense. It consists of a pdf with the overview and narrative (including flowcharts to figure out what parts to read depending on what you want to do with the information!), and then printable pdfs with all the materials needed to conduct the exercises described. They did this project in co-creation with students and teachers over a span of 1.5 years and in four types of meetings, which I will describe a bit further down.
In the toolkit, they use the UN SDGs as a frame, but acknowledges criticism of them, like their western & anthropocentric focus, normativity, capitalist agenda, and vulnerability to greenwashing practices. Nevertheless, the SDGs are good conversation starters, and they rephrased the SDGs for higher education and compiled “Competency Conversation Cards” that consist of a short description of one SDG each (sourced from their reformulated SDGs for higher ed), and then the key competencies and sample questions for learning outcomes. They use Bloom’s taxonomy (or rather the revised version by Anderson & Krathwohl, that I used to work with a lot 10 years ago) to write learning outcomes as a verb (the action associated with the intended cognitive process, e.g. identify, summarise, integrate, …) and an object (describing the knowledge, e.g. pH tests of water samples, compliance with regulations, consistency among sources, …), so their example questions are something like “can learners create scenarios and visions of a future in which developing countries are equally represented in decision-making in economic institutions?”.
The second part of their framework are then sustainability skills: interpersonal, strategic, normative, anticipatory, systemic, intrapersonal, (inter)disciplinarity.
They explore questions around sustainability in four types of meetings:
Semi-structured, explorative interviews (ca 45 min) are run to get a better understanding of the subjective experience of teacher-student pairs in a program (so they suggest to do as many interviews as possible…). They provide instructions for the interview and how to tweak them. Sample questions are for example on the core of the program, according to the interviewee, how “sustainability in education” fits with the image of the program, if sustainability ever comes up in conversations, and if so how.
Talk-out loud protocols (1.5-2 hours) to “let teachers and students dig into their own programs to find hidden layers of sustainability”, using a matrix of the SDGs vs the competencies. Participants of this talk-out loud protocol are asked to prepare by reading up on the SDGs, look at syllabi of courses and especially their learning outcomes, and the methods used in that course. During the meeting, participants then color the matrix of SDGs vs competencies, e.g. green for existing, orange for “could be better”, red for “does not fit”, blue to cluster categories, and annotate it. It is totally fine if people want to redefine SDGs and competencies during the process!
“Storyboard” workshop (4-5 hours) to “let teachers and students create sustainability learning goals and tweak existing programs”. Participants prepare by reading about the SDGs, the competency framework, and Bloom. They bring examples of great and awful courses and learning outcomes.
The workshop starts out with a “heroes, mutants, villains” exercise (45 min), where participants dissect a course and realise that they can tweak small parts and that that can change a lot for the overall experience. This is a bit like “continue, start, stop“, except in a more co-created process where people identify the heroes (continue), mutants (change to something better), and villains (stop), and work on what could be done abput keeping the heroes, improving the mutants, and getting rid of the villains.
They then use the SDG competency cards described above (1 hour) to see how things can be tweaked to include that SDG better.
Lastly, in the storyboard exercise, participants draw out the work format or assignment for the learning outcome they defined before. Here, the focus should really be on drawing, not writing, except on speech cloud stickers or similar, to focus on what teachers and students would say or think in the situation.
“Campus of the future” workshop (3 hours) to “let teachers and students think critically about the current, and desired, educational context of higher education for sustainability”. Here, they suggest a “fear exercise” to articulate fears, but then let go of them for the duration of the workshop, a “hope exercise” on dreaming up the “what if …?”s, and a world building & “a day in the life” exercise. The goal is to co-create futures and to inspire and discover pathways. This is the workshop that I find the least useful in my context, I cannot imagine “my” teachers building models out of straws and play dough. But maybe that is what we should be doing to dream really big?
In conclusion: This toolbox holds lots of good ideas and it is very convenient that materials are shared ready to be printed and used! There are some things I would tweak for my purposes, for example our teachers are familiar with SOLO, and I wonder how big the benefit is of introducing them to a different taxonomy vs just adapting the materials to use SOLO. We also use a different competency model for sustainability competencies, and one where we think of the competencies as interconnected and interdependent, so having them as a check-list assigned to the different SDGs does not make a lot of sense (and that is actually too simplified in any case, me thinks). Competencies need to be practiced in combination, and spanning several SDGs. So this is where I want to think more how to do it, because on the other hand I totally see the appeal of using such a matrix!
But in any case, the toolkit is great for inspiration!
“You have a part to play” Toolkit (https://edusources.nl/materials/127bf5ab-0bb6-4ad7-9def-d67dc57b7130/you-have-a-part-to-play-toolkit) by E. Meerkerk, E. de Mul, B. Broekhaus (2024)