“Teachers should be allowed to be learners”! Currently reading Lidgren et al. (2006)

What are the barriers to including sustainability into courses and curricula at Lund University? Lidgren, Rodhe and Huisingh (2006) start from the premise that universities have an important role to play, “the state of the world is not the work of ignorant people, but rather the opposite, the result of work made by people with [a bunch of academic degrees]”. But after a strong start towards environmental responsibility and sustainability, by 2004 they report that Lund University has fallen into a bit of a slump, where for example the university president’s excuse for not meeting environmental goals is that the goals were too ambitious in the first place. So what happened — why did Lund University not live up to its own goals?

Changing a huge and decentralized system is never easy. In the case of including sustainability in teaching, what ultimately needs to happen is “changing the way people think, behave and teach. The resistance is therefore likely to be strong, considering that something notoriously hard to define comes and disrupts your well-defined and often highly appreciated course structure and forces you to think in ways you did not have to previously”. As an additional difficulty, in a university, there are at least three sub-cultures, each with their own time lines, decision-making traditions, priorities: faculty, administration, and students. There is “tension in the delegation of and struggle for power”.

But if anything gets implemented in teaching, it is ultimately individual teachers that do it. Lidgren et al. (2006) share a figure showing a sketched teacher, sitting at their desk, contemplating whether they should include something related to sustainable development this year, and they have all the barriers that they identified floating around that teacher (all directly quoted from the figure — and I hear all of them ALL THE TIME now in 2025!):

• Should I really mess up a scientifically derived curricula? This subject is multi disciplinary. It can be studied in dedicated courses and programs
• I don’t see how it would fit into the course. I don’t know the subject that well
• It doesn’t seem to be prioritised by university management, since I never hear or read about it
• It’s scary to realise that current world development is not sustainable and that we need to do something about it. If that was really the case, why haven’t someone reacted?
• I am not an expert on sustainable development, I might say or do something wrong and get criticized, both by my peers and by the students
• I will not be rewarded for my effort. I’d rather do something that I know will pay off
• I have read the environmental report. It says that succesful greeing of curricula is already achieved
• Future employers will ask for sustainability related knowledge when they need it. Until then there is no reason to include it

In his MSc thesis, Lidgren (2004) shows the vicious circle we are in (and I start describing it at a random point): There are no sustainability issues being taught -> Students start their work life without any awareness of non-sustainability, or of how sustainability relates to their work -> When they reach a level where they can hire people, they know and care little about sustainability -> When hiring, sustainability competencies are not what people pay the big bucks for -> Teachers don’t see any demand from the employer side, and students also don’t demand inclusion of sustainability -> There are no sustainability issues being taught…

So how might one get teachers to include sustainability?

In their article, Lidgren et al. (2006) investigate a series of intervention points and give recommendations for action. I am discussing these in decreasing order of importance.

1. “The power to transcend paradigms”.

Even though this is the most important and most impactful intervention point, they unfortunately only describe it (“If we reach the insight that there is no true paradigm, then surely we must be open to questioning current foundations upon which our organisational behaviour rests.”) but don’t offer any suggestions for how to get there.

2. “The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises”.

These are the things that everybody knows, “the great, big, unstated assumptions“. If these deeply rooted paradigms are changed, they have the potential to completely transform a system. Hence there is a lot of resistance against touching the paradigms. Yet, for individuals at least, a paradigm shift happens in an instant, like a switch being flipped, and suddenly we see the world with new eyes.

In their study, Lidgren et al. (2006) found several dominant paradigms at Lund University (that I recognize very well):

• “Miles deep, inches wide“: We value extremely deep knowledge of a very narrow area, and that is how research and teaching are generally organised.
• “Knowledge should be delivered by experts“: I see this so much that teachers say that they are not experts on sustainability, so they cannot mention it, but instead either say that students should take specialized courses on sustainability, or that they want to invite experts into their courses to speak about sustainability.
• “Knowledge evolves through criticism“: This is generally not threatening, since teachers are also “miles deep, inches wide” experts in their topics, but expecting criticism on how teachers are talking about sustainability “might have a deterrent effect against them making attempts to incorporate sustainability in their curricula. However, constructive criticism can also be of aid in the development of new course content”. So if we constructively criticised current teaching, teachers would, based on believing in this paradigm, start to change their teaching?
• “A university is an institution of rationality“: This is an image that seems very important for universities, also in a context not mentioned here, and that is that an approach to talking about “the end of the world as we know it” or any other language that takes the current polycrisis as serious at it is, is often easily dismissed as “too emotional” and therefore not rational. But the problem with this paradigm discussed in the article is that if we assume that universities are so rational, “it strengthens the assumption that universities have achieved the highest possible level of functionality and that whatever is lacking is an inevitable limitation of the system”. This “prevents institutional self-analysis and reform as a s solution to problems since the political pay-off for accepting dysfunction in the system is much greater than for dealing with the root cause”. Currently, with Lund University ranking 3rd in the QS Sustainability ranking, there seems to be a huge political pay-off of whatever is going on…

If we want to work on this, we need to clarify the required paradigm shift:

“If teachers believe that they risk receiving criticism for introducing elements of sustainability into their curricula (paradigm: knowledge evolves through criticism“) and if they believe that they do not have enough knowledge to do it (paradigms: knowledge should be delivered by experts, inch wide, miles deep) nor that a university should be teaching value related issues such as how to make the world a better place for future generations (paradigm: a university is an institution of rationality) then one will have to provide very strong incentives to empower them to proceed with it anyway.”

So what we need to do is to

• “point to the failures of the old paradigm and speak with assurance about the new one;
• instert “new paradigm people” in pleaces of public visibility and power;
• find and promote change agents.“

They quote Orr (which I haven’t yet read myself) with six principles to use to replace the current foundation of modern education, and since I love them, here they are:

1. All education is environmental education
2. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter but of one’s person
3. Knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world
4. We cannot say that we know something until we undestand the effects if it on real people and their communties
5. The power of example over words. A university must live as it preaches; it cannot for instance invest its financial weight in irresponsible things
6. The way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses

3. “The goals of the system”.

Based on interviews, Lidgren et al. (2006) find two main goals for Lund University: producing research results and producing educated students. Curricula are developed such that graduates are prepared for future employment, the “essence of the subject at hand” is delivered, and that students are developing themselves in terms of study skills, critical thinking etc.. Compared to classical main functions of education, there is one missing: “To encourage change towards a fairer society and better world; the transformative function“.

Also looking at policy documents, sustainability is not part of the centrally stated goals, “indicating that sustainability is not seen as a priority goal“. But this could change, we could make sustainability a top priority! It would need to be included in all statements on where the university is heading, and be prominent in all discussions, all materials, … Even if only to give people the leverage to ask “This promise of contribution to SD was once made, what do you intend to do about that commitment?” And then it needs to be interpreted at each faculty or department what that means for them, what is essential for their specific group of students to learn, so that it makes sense.

We need to articulat, stand up for, and insist upon new system goals.

4. “The power to add, change, evolve or organize the structure”.

This intervention point is about changing the way the system is allowed to evolve.

For example, even though there is usually a dean or someone who is responsible for course content and changes to it, “each teacher has a large amount of individual freedom to make changes/add new things”. What typically gets introduced matches what is described in the goals of the system: what employers want or new scientific knowledge from within the narrow subject. But we could work on this if we strengthen student involvement and  utilise stakeholder dialogue.

5. “The rules of the system”.

This intervetion point is about changing the incentive and punishment structures. They suggest to “consider what would happen if students were graded as a group instead of as individuals” — everything would be different!

Currently, “there are neither rewards for successfully including SD into curricula nor are there any penalties for failing to do so”. That is because “LU has no tradition of managing through goals, or of measuring goal fulfilment” as both the president and university director are reported saying.

What we could do is to explicitly encourage intra-university learning. One recommendation is to “make people from diffeerent disciplines meet and use their respective knowledge to solve a common problem, which is likely to open new avenues of knowledge and, equally important, to introduce new allies within the field of sustainable development.” And to repeat, over and over again, that “every discipline and every teacher can contribute to sustainability education”!

I love another of their suggestions, to use a course module in one of the sustainability programs to developing curricula at LU on sustainability. Teachers from across LU meet the sustainability students and co-create new ways of implementing sustainability. If I am taking this and running with it, we should organise sprints to do this, where people who want to implement something in their courses act as the problem givers, and other teachers, students, maybe external people, coaches, mentors, use 2 days to support development (while gaining a whole lot of inspiration from that, I am sure!). Imagine how much we could get done in a very intense work period where we share resources and labor and knowledge and ideas!

6. “The structure of information flow”.

This intervention point is about making the previously invisible visible. They report that “none of the interviewees knew if their progress along the environmental axis was measured in any way. It can be concluded that the way the LU system is currently monitored does not provide any incentive to include SD in any of its 90 programs and 1000 courses“. But they suggest that “what gets measured gets done. We measure what we value”. That might mean measuring what our graduates know when they are done, if they are committed to make societal changes! (and maybe we should also look at alumni!) We can also assess stakeholder perceptions of LU’s performance against LU’s core values (but this is a bit difficult if we are 3rd in the world in a ranking, people might then feel that this is good enough already?) But in any case, we can always ask internal and external stakeholders for ideas on what we could and should improve, and for their ideas on how to do that!

So this is the summary of this article. Now, almost 20 years after this article was published, it feels like not much has changed, at least not based on what the teachers I talk with every day tell me about how they feel regarding implementing sustainability in their teaching, or of what I perceive the dominant paradigms to be. Lidgren et al. (2006) conclude by saying “To realise this uncertainty inherent in achieving SD is crucial in the higher education setting: it must be recognized that the journey towards sustainable societies is filled with uncertainty. Teachers should be allowed to be learners in this field. The presence of the present paradigms will otherwise continue to cause great barriers to change.”. And I think this point is crucial: Teachers need to feel that they are allowed to be learners, to make mistakes. And that is difficult for people who have spent their whole lives, have built their careers, in paradigms that are conflicting with that identity. But we need to remember that nobody knows how to “solve” sustainability, and nobody can know, because it is emergent. All we can do is try to work in the right direction, and re-evaluate and re-adjust. And try to live the journey the way that we envision the goal: caring, just, sustainable. The process is the point.

In other news: I was dipping in ice cold water this morning, but the ice had blown away. But, as you see in the featured image and below, it was still beautiful!

Lidgren (2004) “A sustainable course for higher education“, MSc thesis at Lund University

Lidgren, A., Rodhe, H., & Huisingh, D. (2006). A systemic approach to incorporate sustainability into university courses and curricula. Journal of cleaner production, 14(9-11), 797-809.