Testing an online course on Sustainability Education by teff

I’m always scanning the horizon on teaching for sustainability courses online to make sure I a) keep myself up-to-date with the state of the art, and b) don’t re-invent the wheel with our upcoming MOOC. I had been waiting for this one to come online for a couple of weeks and when I checked today, there it was!

So today, I browsed the online course on Sustainability Education by the “Teacher Education for a Future in Flux (teff) academy”. The first module is on sustainability as a concept and walks you through all the typical topics: Wicked problems, weak vs strong sustainability, the SDGs and the wedding cake model, planetary boundaries and the doughnut. So far, so aligned with what is typically presented in that context.

The second module is on sustainability education, starting out with a timeline (similar to this one). There is a discussion about all the similar but slightly different terms of Sustainability Education (the umbrella term which they choose to use), education for sustainability (where sustainability in itself is the goal), education for sustainable development (which focusses on the separate areas of social, economical and ecological sustainability in a weak way).

They then go into pedagogical approaches, which they classify along the two axes transmissive (learning of facts from a teacher) to transformative (empowerment of students to develop their own world-view), and instrumental (knowledge on the “right” thing to do) to emancipatory (critically evaluating and making your own decisions in a wicked world). Looking into the literature they recommend, the model is elaborated on more in Papenfuss et al. (2019), where the question “what should we learn” in the transmissive and instrumental corner can develop into “what can we learn?” (when moving towards emancipation), or “how might I see the world?” (when moving towards transformation), and “what can we become?” in the transformative and emancipatory corner. Interesting! That fits well with the control of process / control of content considerations I like to show. Papenfuss et al. (2019) suggest that in addition to whatever pedagogical approach one chooses, “contemplative pedagogies may help to ease learners into a world that is already in rapid transition, and help to foster the awareness, compassion, and authentic care urgently needed in society“, and I do believe that they are on to something (as you see from my recent obsession with doodling)!

Next, the course introduces the “Whole School Approach” (WSA) which sounds very nice (check out this summary video on youtube!): it’s a systemic approach (addressing the whole school — the clue was in the name) centered around anchoring sustainability at the core of a school. This supports teachers that are already doing sustainability work and at the same time relieves them from some of the work around lobbying for sustainability, convincing colleagues and parents, etc.. WSA approaches seem to be most successful if they are relevant to all stakeholders in the context; have enough resources in terms of expertise, personnel, financing; are reflective and evaluate their work; are flexible and responsive to context and emerging understanding, and are reforming thinking and practice. Importantly, WSA schools are co-created with all stakeholders, including students and parents.

The third module is on Sustainability Education Planning. They start out with constructive alignment, then with writing intended learning outcomes inspired by typical key sustainability competencies (systems-, values-, futures-, strategies thinking and cooperation/interpersonal skills) and the domains of knowledge, skills, and judgement/approach. They then provide suggestions for how to connect those intended learning outcomes with methods (but of course on a very abstract level), and then there is a unit about assessment. So far so not surprising. Then, there are some ideas for learning opportunities and how to connect them to local context (e.g. researching local climate change impacts), and a few prompts to develop your own.

What I find very interesting are the questions in the suggested self-review of whatever unit one would have developed there, for example “Does the activity respond to an interesting and relevant challenge or opportunity for the educational context?” or “Does the activity establish alliances with relevant groups or social agents in the environment?” (in addition to normal stuff about constructive alignment etc). And then that is it already!

What I can learn for our MOOC:

• There is a very large overlap of the concepts and tools presented in those three modules and what we are planning to introduce, too. I don’t think I would go so much into constructive alignment and how to write intended learning outcomes, but mostly because there are other places where my target audience of teachers is supposed to have learnt that
• Speaking of target audience, here they are “teachers”, probably implying school. But it would be just as relevant for university teachers since there are no concrete examples learning activities and all the other concepts are the same anyway. What that means is that with all the examples planned in our MOOC, we are on the one hand restricting who the MOOC is most relevant for, on the other hand we do want to give very practical and transferrable examples, and I think there is a benefit in that both in inspiration and in lowering the threshold because the transfer isn’t as far
• I noticed that it would be nice to know who is behind the course — I could not find that information anywhere! In our case there will be videos of us, so there is a bit more context available
• I like the format with mostly text; makes browsing so much more efficient than videos
• It’s nice to have literature lists on every page so it is super easy to follow up on something that sparks your interest! I really appreciated that
• Since this course was on a platform I didn’t know, I noticed an interesting feature: “Cards” with a question on one side, that you can “flip over” (by pushing a button which then results in the animation) to see model responses on the other side. Not sure if it was the novelty value, but they were more fun than a drop-down menu!
• On the platform, it is easy to see more other interesting courses and thus get stuck, which happened to me, so more on those below! But it is a nice feature when you find something new and interesting to read right away!

The next course I checked out was Diversity and Inclusion Skills in Education. It starts with a lot of legal stuff and basic terminology, but there was a framework of anti-oppressive education that I liked that describes four approaches:

• Education for the Other: improve the environment for marginalised students
• Education About the Other: since marginalised groups are often invisible and silenced, this is about learning about them
• Education that Is Critical of Privileging and Othering: increasing awareness about oppression of some and normalisation of others
• Education that Changes Students and Society: is transformative learning

A teacher can use one or several or all of these approaches at a time. That is unfortunately all we learn about this and I would really have liked to see some examples to work with the model, but in general, this is also a good introductory course and especially the part in the end about how to become an “activist teacher” is nice!

And then the course about Teacher Well-Being also caught my eye. What I liked about it even before starting is that they have guidance on what to do when you take the course individually (in a nutshell: get a notebook for a journal) or in a group (create an idea hub to collectively collect ideas) to develop an action plan. This looks super promising, but unfortunately it was impossible to find the rest of the course because the links all go to some digital skills course instead, so sad!

Papenfuss, J., Merritt, E., Manuel-Navarrete, D., Cloutier, S. & Eckard, B. (2019). Interacting pedagogies: A review and framework for sustainability education. Journal of Sustainability Education, 20. https://susted.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Papenfuss-JSE-April-2019-General-Issue-PDF.pdf

Here are some freediving pictures from very early summer to cheer me up while everybody else is at training and I still have the lung capacity of a hamster. This is the quarry we often dive in, and you can see four buoys with freedivers in the background, and one freediver in the foreground. Not diving alone, we are watching him!

Here is a buoy up close. It looks so pretty in the reflections in the surface!

Surface reflections are always awesome.

Maybe my favourite part of underwater pictures; endlessly fascinating! We are so used to not be able to look into water and just seeing the sky reflected, but not being able to look out when you know that you should be looking at the sky is just weird.

But it’s a pretty place to dive!

And this is just looking down at the shadow of my own head.

Bubbles are also always cool!

And it does look a bit spooky with this level of visibility…

But so pretty with the light streaming in!