Teaching about, with, in, through, for sustainability?

This morning on the bus I was browsing bluesky, and came across a post by Kyle Bartlett, suggesting a framework for how to think about Education for Sustainable Development with, for, in, about, and through sustainable development (see below).

It really resonated with me and stuck in the back of my mind all day, coming up in discussions with Rachel and others, and now I have tried to think how we could adapt it to support discussions with STEM teachers. Here is my first suggestion:

I think it can be really helpful to consider these distinctions of teaching about sustainability, where we are focussing on sustainability concepts like SDGs and challenges like planetary boundaries; with sustainability where we add examples of where sustainability and disciplinary content are connected; in sustainability where we position the discipline in a sustainable world; through sustainability where we model, for example, equitable ways of communication; and lastly for sustainability, where we want to inspire action.

In practice, there is probably always a mixture of several or all of those categories in most teaching situations. There needs to be some knowledge about sustainability to motivate why we are teaching with sustainability examples, and we can always use equitable classroom strategies or Liberating Structures on teaching any content or skills. And in anything we do, we can, and should, work towards practicing key competencies for sustainability. But reflecting on which of these categories we aim for with a given class, and whether we end up landing in that category or somewhere else, is a good way to think about learning outcomes and about what methods and what content actually support working towards those learning outcomes.

I will practice test this framework tomorrow, and would love to hear your comments! :-)

See the original post and framework below (click on the image for link to the original post):