Addressing sustainability in a fact-based, normative or pluralistic way?

I always advocate for talking about sustainability even when you feel not ready to do it, because I believe that not talking about things is never a good solution. But I realized in a conversation last week that I am making a lot of assumptions about how comfortable and skilled people are in moderating conversations, so here are some reflections on that.

So while my message is to talk about sustainability when I write about the spiral of silence or the unhelpful paradigms in academia, there are things to consider when we do the talking.

First, it is helpful to be aware of three different traditions in sustainability education that do the talking in very different ways (Öhman & Östman, 2019), and to consider how you want to be talking about sustainability on that background.

• The fact-based tradition is focussed on teaching and learning of knowledge, with the assumption that enough knowledge will enable people to make good decision and enact them in their future lives, when they can take part in democratic processes.
• The normative tradition focusses on transferring sustainability values and behaviors. Democratic decisions happen before the teaching, when it is decided which values, norms, morals are desirable.
• The pluralistic tradition is about letting students develop the ability to critically discuss and evaluate a wider range of alternatives, and take a stand on sustainability issues. The idea is that engaging in democratic debate in the classroom is part of living in a democracty and that living in a democracy will lead to a sustainable future.

These three traditions run parallel to the three purposes of education that Biesta describes: qualification (to be able to do something in the workforce or function in society), socialisation (to continue culture and traditions, values, norms, … to bring newcomers in; can be professional or other), and subjectification (becoming autonomous and independent in thinking and acting).

All three traditions have value and their space in the classroom — there are some things that society agrees that students just need to learn about (maybe not so much at university, but definitely in school; and even at university there are large communities that determine what the core curriculum should be in different disciplines). There are also norms that we are not willing to compromise on (for example at Lund University, we are not tolerating discrimination based on protected characteristics). And of course we want our graduates to have become independent critical thinkers.

But those three purposes of education are not independent of each other. Gerd Biesta describes it as playing 3D chess, where each move on one board influences the two other boards. For example, if we focus on “just calculating things”, i.e. qualification, that does imply what we value, so we are socializing students into only valuing calculations; and it also does imply how we see the students’ role in the world — in this case not as an autonomous subject. So saying things like “I only teach facts” is, in itself, already not neutral, it is communicating a value judgement and an approach to being in the world. So it is important to be aware that inaction or silence on sustainability questions are not neutral, that is also a stance.

This then leaves the question of how to position ourselves as a teacher. If we cannot be neutral anyway, we should make sure that what we do is aligned with our values (and a nice way to think about that is presented in Nooij et al. (2025)’s article “Do not leave your values at the door”). And it is important to explicitly distinguish between what we teach as “facts”, what we teach as norms and values because that is what national law or the school’s policy require, and what we teach as our own norms or values because they matter to us.

And that brings us to how we actually do this in the classroom. How can we invite all students to contribute with their honest opinions and questions, while at the same time it does not make that “anything goes”? We suggest some methods in “teaching through sustainability” for how to include all (or at least most) students. One way to show that personal experiences are a legitimate and valued way of knowing and that we want to hear from everybody, not just from people with a specific type of experience or opinion, is an exercise described by bell hooks: have everybody write short paragraphs about the topic, which are then all read out in class.

On the classroom management side of things, inviting contributions from everybody also means that we sometimes have to tell someone to wrap it up in the interest of time, or to make sure that whatever interesting story they are talking about is actually relevant to the topic. And it might mean having to deal with microaggressions (see my “boots and sandals” resource for how to deal with that), or even overt, full-on aggressions, or climate deniers (there are great resources for how to deal with climate deniers that are definitely worth checking out, e.g. Sceptical Science, or the UN Myth busters!). And the oldest teacher trick in the book is of course to thank someone for a comment, say that in the interest of time we cannot deal with it now but will get back to it next time, move on as planned, and then use the time until the next class to figure out how to deal with the situation (looking into resources, bringing a colleague, …).

Lastly, it is important that teachers don’t trample into topics without having considered that some students might be very much personally affected by those topics, due to experiences or just compassion. I think I need to write something about trauma-informed teaching soon, but for now it’s a good start to look at the recent post about teaching personally-relevant topics in health education.

Photos from a sunset walk over Easter

Love taking pictures of benches by the sea!

Waiting for the sun to set…

And on the way home again…