Currently reading Stratford et al. (2025) “From Miserable Pedagogies to Anthropocene Intelligence for Universities in the Meta-Crisis”

Stratford et al. (2025) describe current pedagogies that fail to engage with the polycrisis (“meta-crisis” in their article) and thus contribute to mental health struggles in students as “pedagogies of misery”, which, they argue, we should disrupt by means of “Anthropocene Intelligence”.

Stratford et al. (2025) first describe the state of the world in a meta-crisis and how the current efforts, including the SDGs of the Agenda 2030, are nowhere near enough, and even going in the wrong direction by clinging to debunked concepts such as sustainable growth. They build on Orr’s analysis that “all education is environmental education (Orr, 1989) and that university education, in particular, has the potential to make people more effective (planetary) vandals (Orr, 1994)” and write that “while universities can do a good job of educating doctors, economists, classicists, physicists, and so on, they frequently fail to prepare young people well enough as active, healthier eco-citizens who might address the interconnected elements of the meta-crisis.”

What they call “misery” in their “pedagogies of misery” is about the “interconnected planetary and personal impacts of the meta-crisis”. Their goal “is not so much to specify “how miserable” each example of university teaching is— but to rather point to how such pedagogy might look to a “stressed out” young person struggling within the meta-crisis”. So what are these four pedagogies of misery?

1. “Active contributors” are pedagogies that actively contribute to destroying the world, such as mainstream economics and other programs that prepare students to work with unsustainable practices, for example in fishing, mining, oil (hello, Norway)

2. “Ignore the issues”, which Stratford et al. (2025) say is perhaps the most common and I agree with this assessment, is about just not addressing the polycrisis, because it is not part of the traditional curriculum of a discipline and the traditional ideal of “objectivity”. And it is not enough to just “green” the curriculum (or, as we would say, “teaching with sustainability”) but rather we need to rethink what we need to teach, including how we see ourselves and the discipline in relation to the world and each other, and how we can address “developing meaning, purpose, and connection”

3. “Overly optimistic”, is about “narrow and or technological answers to the interconnected crises of the meta-crisis”, so teaching that you can address the polycrisis one (technological) fix at a time, also “casting students as individual saviours who can contribute their skills to build a better world”. Which, I think, I might sometimes be guilty of myself in a misguided attempt to empower students, although Stratford et al. (2025)’s examples are more things like second hand shops, climate change courses, … But this is definitely also a pedagogy that I observe in a lot of courses at LTH if they address sustainability at all.

4. “Describe reality”, often extracurricular, accurately describing the polycrisis but without giving students any suggestions and inspiration for how to address and change reality, so students leave even more miserable than before.

All of these I have definitely seen happening. So what now?

Stratford et al. (2025) describe Anthropocene Intelligence as an “ecological worldview for living and learning well on planet Earth”. It means acknowledging that most planetary boundaries are breached and we are in a polycrisis. It also means recognizing that education is happening in “actual places” and needs to be connected to that specific context rather than striving for universal knowledge. We also need to reconsider what it means to know, how we relate to other people, and our responsibility in the world. This will make it necessary to confront existing power structures and creatively change things. Stratford et al. (2025) describe students as partners and integration with local communities as possible approaches.

They address the “double bind” of working within a knowledge system and thus propagating it, while knowing that the knowledge system needs to change and trying to figure out what it should be like, and advise to not approach it as a binary either-or, but somehow try to find out way out of it, “and doing the best we can to thrive anyway”. I wish I knew what this would look like, but at least the framing of these four miserable pedagogies is a helpful new way to think about what we can change in individual courses!

Stratford, R., Louverdis, E., & Joy, M. (2025). From miserable pedagogies to anthropocene intelligence for universities in the meta-crisis. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 41(5), 1154-1170.

The little lighthouse in Travemünde, seen at my previous trip to Germany… As you can probably see from the waves, the ferry is sailing into port here!