Follow-up on a course meeting in “Teaching for Sustainability”
Intrapersonal competency
Implementation competency
Reflection
Several participants mentioned a focus on reflection tasks that they wanted their students to do, and this reminds me of two blog posts I wrote recently(-ish). In the first one, I tried different reflection prompts (see towards the end of that post) just because I wanted to know how the prompts would influence how I think about stuff (no surprise there — they are SUPER important). And the second one is about a paper on reflexivity in qualitative research, but I thought their prompts were super super thought-provoking (again, no surprise there) and might also be worth considering in a teaching context. I am sure they can be adapted depending on what the actual purpose of the reflection is (for example these two: “What are my assumptions of re exivity itself? How do I understand it to work, what do I expect it to do?” and “What are my conscious and unconscious goals and my desired endpoints in being re exive?” (Trundle et al., 2025))!
Role play
I did not write anything down about role plays, but somehow I have something in the back of my mind that I wanted to mention that while role plays can be an amazing tool, it is SUPER important to spend sufficient time and effort on the debriefing. I don’t have a lot of experience with role plays myself (also because I HATE playing role plays), so I would really want to stress the point that if you do an exercise with students that might make them uncomfortable, at least make it worth it in terms of learning!
10 minutes for the bigger context
One of the typical suggestions for getting started with co-creation is to reserve one or two sessions per semester for topics that students want to learn more about. I really liked the suggestion that came up in the class instead, though: rather than do that and thus create distance between all the normal session and then those special sessions in the end, include 10 minutes (or so, it’s not an exact science) in each session, thus sprinkling the topic and co-creation everywhere throughout the semester.
Should we then make it explicit that those 10 minutes are “sustainability minutes”? I think this depends very much on context and can be argued either way. If we thing about teaching in sustainability, we could say that students are taking the course (likely) for the first time, and it is an opportunity for the teacher to role model that sustainability is a natural part of their discipline, and then that is what the students will take on. On the other hand students are not necessarily going to recognise that what they are talking about is how the discipline can contribute to sustainability, so there is also value in making it explicit! And maybe it’s not an either/or, maybe we can start out implicit and then make it explicit after a while, or start out explicit and then at some point assume that students make the connection now.
Entry points through topics that engage students
Transfer / “translation”
This came up in the context of continued education, where “translation” happens through case studies where learning is applied directly in the context where it is needed, in the workplaces of people taking the course. The point is that those students specifically WANT to bring things home, which is why they are taking the continued education in parallel to their jobs. But then wouldn’t all students want to “bring something home”, bring value from their education to their communities and the issues that they care about? So another argument for co-creating topics and problems students work on!
Subjectification, and “what will you do with your freedom?”
Biesta says that the most important question we can ask ourselves and our students is “what will you do with your freedom“. If you haven’t explored any of the links in this blogpost so far, I really recommend that you check out the podcast where he talks about this! (Of course also if you have looked at other links, this is really worth watching!)
In this context, it is worth remembering that academic freedom is a core value of both the universities that are involved in this course: University of Bergen (“The University of Bergen is an international research university in which all activity is grounded in the principles of academic freedom and curiosity-driven research.“, Strategy UiB 2023-2030) and Lund University (“Lund University is firmly committed to academic freedom“, where they then continue that this includes freedom to “participate openly in public debate and discuss research, both their own and in a broader context“). And in this context I want to recommend also looking into the article “Do not leave your values at the door; the permissibility of activism in the lecture hall” by Nooij et al. (2025) for a nice discussion of what academic freedom should mean. Relatedly, I started reading about “teaching to say no” a while ago and am really interested in pursuing that further! Maybe one of the projects will come up with good suggestions? :-)
“Plus-one approach” — one step at a time!
Lastly, having seen an enormous amount of energy and ambition yesterday, I want to just say that while I appreciate the enthusiasm and will do my very best to support you all in that, it is also ok to take things one step at a time. In UDL, there is often the recommendation of taking a “plus-one” approach, making courses more accessible (or, in our case, more sustainable) one iteration at a time. It is important that we operate with enough sensitivity and caution and care that we can think through what we are doing and not burn out. The process is the point. For a really great book on how to work with urgency but still slow down, check out the “everyday changemaker” book by Venet (2024) (online access via LUB)!
And that is it for today. The featured image from my morning walk with Terese (thanks, as always, for the best company!)!