Catching up on some reading on sustainability teaching
I have a bunch of articles that were recommended during our LTHEChat on teaching sustainability last year that have been sitting in a special folder, waiting for a day like today where the best thing to do (right after a dip and a looong, comfy breakfast) is to curl up on the couch and read. So here we go! As always, I am not summarising the articles, but just noting what I find relevant for my own practice at this moment in time…
First up: Espinoza-Ramos & Capucci-Polzin (2024) on “Embedding sustainability in curricula: A case study of an education for sustainable development (ESD) framework at the Westminster Business School.” In that paper, they develop “a framework to aid educators in embedding ESD in their curricula“. Their framework consists of nine steps: 1) align ESD policy and education strategy; 2) map the course learning outcomes; 3) map the module learning outcomes, 4) think about pedagogy, 5) do training of module design, 6) design learning activities, 7) think about assessment, 8) what are indicators for how well the whole thing worked? 9) get feedback for improvement.
They then apply this framework to a course. What I find most interesting there is how they provide students with the opportunity to tailor the assignments to their individual interests while still being pretty specific in what they want to see. In the first assignment, a poster, students pick a city and two SDGs (in addition to SDG 1 that they need to discuss in any case), two social or environmental sustainability issues, and a tool to analyse the issues with. In the second assessment, a report, they can choose a different city than in the first assessment if they want, but then pick two solutions to the issues identified in the first assessment, reflect on their own roles and on two solutions they experienced in a field trip (walking or online) earlier in the course.
So far, so good. If I had to recommend a framework to work with, I would stick with Hallgarth (2025), since it encourages much deeper engagement with what the community is thinking and doing, what our own assumptions are going into the redesign process, what we can build on, but also how to actively and cognitively engage students with content, not just making them “active” by encouraging the physical activity of a walking field trip…
Next up: Espinoza-Ramos (2024a) on “Making education for sustainable development (ESD) more inclusive and engaging through universal design for learning (UDL): A case study at the Westminster Business School.” Here they first present an overview over ESD and UDL, and then apply UDL principles to the same course as in the chapter above. For example, for “multiple means of action and expression”, they present students with opportunities to learn in large or small groups, on their own, through reading or writing, etc.. They use the terms “visual learner”, “interpersonal learner”, “intra-personal learner”, “reading/writing learner”, but only in a table and without further explanation, so I am hoping that this is about learner preferences, not the debunked learning styles…
What is interesting in this chapter is that they now include co-creation through student representatives and different forms of student feedback.
Next: Espinoza-Ramos (2024b) on “Embedding Education of Sustainable Development (ESD) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles in a field trip to improve the student learning experience.” We stay with the same course as in the two previous articles, and now look at the 90 minute field trip specifically. I like that it is offered both as a walk and as a virtual tour, and that students can choose to do either.
Moving on to different authors:
Collazo Expósito and Granados Sánchez (2020) on “Implementation of SDGs in university teaching: A course for professional development of teachers in education for sustainability for a transformative action.” They present a “training model in transformative action for sustainability” which is a tree that is based on a definition of sustainability that puts ecological, economical and social issues under the same umbrella, and the tree has three main branches: content (mostly the SDGs), theoretical approaches (which “respond to the recognition of the need to move from the current anthropocentric worldviews and patterns of development to a biocentric and/or ecocentric worldviews“), and training methods (“coherent with the acquisition of sustainability competencies by learners and the way they are assessed“). They then design an academic development course based on this model, and evaluate several iterations of that course.
In the evaluation, they find that having used a lot of active learning methods in their course, teachers replicate that in how they design their own courses (consistent with what Kjersti, Cathy and I recently suggested — modelling active learning and co-creation in academic development courses can inspire teachers to use it themselves, too). They also find that having a diverse set of participants leads to a more holistic understanding of sustainability (another argument to continue teaching our own Teaching for Sustainability course not just restricted to one faculty!).
The last paper I want to read today is Nicholson and Vargas (2021): “Design principles for assessment of sustainability teaching.” They suggest that rather than thinking of assessment of learning, we should be thinking about assessment for learning (providing feedback on teaching and learning), or even as assessment as learning (empowering students to self-regulate and critically evaluate; funny though that they don’t do that in their title!).
They suggest design principles for sustainability assessment:
- Learner-centred, to motivate “self-regulated learning and increased agency”
- Flexible, for example when it comes to timing and weighting of assessment, the format or method, the content (one nice example for flexibility in the content is given above)
- Future-facing and global, for example by first responding to an initial scenario, then responding to a new development of that scenario, or looking at it from a different perspective.
- Active and experiential, captured for example in learning portfolios
- Collaborative (but possibly complemented by peer review or individual assessment to compensate for “large variations in effort and achievement”)
- Multidisciplinary (no good suggestions for what that means in practice though)
- Authentic and situated
- Affective, for example in reflective logs, video diaries or blogs
- Enquiry-based
For some reason I like these types of lists, it always makes me want to go check my own teaching against them (which, I guess, is kinda the point!)
So that’s a wrap — all done on that folder! Nice. And I just found another article that I absolutely have to read today, so stay tuned for that!
[Edit later that day: Found another article that should have been in that folder but was instead in one of the open tabs. Summary added below…]
Ahmad et al. (2023) wrote “CoDesignS education for sustainable development: A framework for embedding education for sustainable development in curriculum design“. Their framework has three pillars:
- The key competencies for sustainability that are relevant to all SDGs in ways of thinking, practicing, and being.
- Specific learning objectives for the SDGs with a focus on targeting head, hands, and heart.
- Transformative pedagogies and teaching methods (somehow, since reading about Sandri (2022)’s iceberg model the other day, I find it more and more annoying to lump pedagogy, approaches and methods into the same category as if they are all the same)
From their website, it looks like the toolkit provides visualisations of several (self-declared) components of the course, for example the relative proportions of hand-head-heart. Sadly, the toolkit does not seem to be available online, but many cases of teams that have worked with it are, and there it seems like the structure is helpful to reflect on, and redesign, courses. But, as they also report that participants gave as feedback, the focus on SDGs means that they are often addressed individually rather than as interconnected, and similarly also the key competencies which seem to be picked individually rather than thought of as interdependent. Which is probably better than nothing, especially for teachers that are starting out with including sustainability in their teaching, but the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that we need to focus on pedagogy to support the approaches to learning and based on that look at the methods… We’ll see how that works out in our own MOOC with our own framework!
Ahmad, N., Toro-Troconis, M., Ibahrine, M., Armour, R., Tait, V., Reedy, K., … & Inzolia, Y. (2023). CoDesignS education for sustainable development: A framework for embedding education for sustainable development in curriculum design. Sustainability, 15(23), 16460.
Collazo Expósito, L. M., & Granados Sánchez, J. (2020). Implementation of SDGs in university teaching: A course for professional development of teachers in education for sustainability for a transformative action. Sustainability, 12(19), 8267.
Daae, K., Bovill, C., and Glessmer, M. S. (23 Dec 2025): How academic developers can use modelling to promote active learning and co-creation, International Journal for Academic Development, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2025.2602863
Espinoza-Ramos, G., & Capucci-Polzin, A. (2024, June). Embedding sustainability in curricula: A case study of an education for sustainable development (ESD) framework at the Westminster Business School. In International Conference on CSR, Sustainability, Ethics and Governance (pp. 279-299). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Espinoza-Ramos, G. R. (2024a). Making education for sustainable development (ESD) more inclusive and engaging through universal design for learning (UDL): A case study at the Westminster Business School. In An agenda for sustainable development research (pp. 651-669). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Espinoza-Ramos, G. R. (2024b). Embedding Education of Sustainable Development (ESD) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles in a field trip to improve the student learning experience. In Outdoor Learning in Higher Education (pp. 161-171). Routledge.
Nicholson, Dawn and Vargas, Valeria (2021) Design principles for assessment of sustainability teaching. In: Assessment and Feedback in a Post-Pandemic Era: a time for learning and inclusion. AdvanceHE, pp. 183-195. ISBN 9781916359352
Featured image and pictures below from this morning’s dip.
This is my favourite view no matter the weather and season!
About here I realised that maybe it wasn’t my smartest idea to go dipping today. Cold and very windy!
But it’s the best feeling when you are out again! :-D
Tony Westminster says:
Hi,
This is a really great, curated list that goes beyond the usual recommendations. I appreciate how it groups the readings by theme—Transformative Teaching, Systems Thinking, Student Motivation—which helps you immediately see how different pedagogical approaches can work together. The inclusion of more philosophical pieces (like the one on “imagining new ways of being”) alongside practical papers about implementing systems thinking in the classroom makes it a holistic resource.
The brief “why this is worth your time” summaries for each link are incredibly helpful; they provide just enough context to decide if a paper matches your immediate need. My biggest takeaway is the suggestion to make systems thinking central to a course, rather than a one-off topic. That feels like the kind of foundational shift that could make sustainability education truly impactful.