I am currently in the early stages of co-developing a course, most likely project-based, on sustainability for engineering students. I have written a lot about how I am trying to make sense of key competencies in sustainability and how to assess them, but then I recently stumbled across a Future Learning Design podcast interview with Ginie Servant-Mikols, which I found so inspiring that I listened to another interview with her, and then browsed her publication list, and turns out this is going to be super helpful for what we are planning on doing! Here are my first take-aways.
The first episode I listened to caught my eye because it was called something with “Bildung” in combination with “climate schools”. There, amongst other topics, they discuss place-based learning in the city. I’ve been thinking about place-based learning a lot recently, inspired both by Laura Weitze’s presentation in Lund (which I write about here) and then also discussions in Steven’s “Integrating Sustainability Competencies in the Curriculum” course. In the article “Going for a walk: Using psychogeography to explore sustainability in art and design” (Cooke & Mace, 2020), which I found when reading up on using storytelling in sustainability higher education, they write “there are elements of playfulness and nonconformity in the act of walking around a place when there is no particular destination in mind and no plan” which, to me, sounds so inspiring in itself, and describes my “active lunch break” experience very well. In the article, they suggest three teaching units which, even though their article is about art and design, I think it could be adapted to work well for most subjects and topics:
- Reading a narrative about a walk and reflecting on what the author focusses on, and reflect on it. Then go for a walk and observe. Don’t follow a set path, only your gut feeling in the moment (“Follow your noses, get lost and explore”), but then repeat the walk many times and observe. Document and add to the documentation at each walk, focussing on how things might be perceived differently each time. The instructions can be tailored specifically to a discipline, subject, or concept. The results can be collected and shared in an exhibition (or collection of posts, or in any way you choose)
- Playing with maps and looking at power relationships, different mapping cultures, perspectives, changes throughout history. Then take a walk and create your own map based on your observations, what you think is relevant and should be raised (this very much reminds me of what I did to a couple of places years ago when I did “alternative tourist guides” and even guided tours (for example here and here) that focussed on great wave watching spots!).
- Change the perspective of the walk. In the last ISCC meeting, someone talked about a “being a tourist” activity that has been implemented in Berlin, where students (who live in Berlin) act as if they were tourists and experience the conflicts between inhabitants and tourists from a different perspective. I think this is such a great way to experience a place in a completely different way!
Anyway, back to the podcast I was listening to! One example of really using the place for learning is to create a “soundscape” related to a specific question in a whatsapp group, where students are in different spots in the city and text the sounds they hear in the group, for example “wrooom” for cars speeding past. I can imagine this working so well to get an impression of what sounds are dominating — I was listening to the podcast walking along Långabryggan (see pics) and all I could hear was the wind. At least at first. Then my own footsteps. And the waves against the pillars. And the seagulls. It would have been so much fun to document this using either descriptions of the sounds (like the “wrooom” for cars) or maybe emojis, and at the same time reading what other people are hearing. This is such a cool method to encurage careful observation and then compile data in real time!
Another train of thought that I found intriguing in that episode is how teaching for sustainability might be most effective if it happens during a formative period (maybe not surprising) and away from home (so as to not meet old friends every evening and being pulled back into old pattern). I wonder how easy it is to transfer the new identity and behaviours back into the old context afterwards. But now a new identity has at least the chance to form during this protected time in a bubble, and maybe the “returning home problem” is something to solve in a next step.
One exercise they describe is walking around as the leader you want to be in 15 years time, including body language, how you use the space around you (I’m thinking of manspreading and women typically taking as little space as possible. Even though manspreading is not something I aspire to, it is interesting to consider how one might want to take more space, like making sure to have a seat at the table always, and not a chair in the second row). This sounds like fun, and also like a really good way to reflect on how we are currently presenting ourselves in the world and what we want to develop to.
Another interesting thought is around can we still dance when we see all the catastrophes happening around us everywhere? There, she says that “if we loose the right to dance, we loose our humanity. If the music stops, we have already lost” (anyone else think of the Titanic here?). But I think it is really important to not just give yourself permission to be joyful in the face of catastrophe, but to aspire to it in order to keep what is most worth keeping.
From this episode, I went back to another one on the same podcast, where Ginie Servant-Miklos talks about her book, Pedagogies of Collapse (which I have not read yet, but ordered). This one was really interesting, too, and what I found most mind-blowing is to think about the history of public education, that was never about liberating, it was about domesticating kids that, when a lot of manual labour became redundant during the industrial revolution, were not spending their days in mines or on fields any more, and needed to be kept off the streets and away from drugs. So public schooling was a way of domesticating, of getting rid of dialects and promoting one form of language, all those things. Which, in a way, we are still doing when we think about Bologna and education that is the same all around the world (which is why place-based education, as discussed above, is a way to reconnect to the local context, to work on the skills and knowledge that is needed locally, to build resilience in very small, local contexts). I did not write down a direct quote for it, but there was a very strong point that education is highly correlated to negative impact on the earth through for example carbon (and other) footprints, and that, when the collapse inevitably comes, it will not be kind to people who are used to just working with their brains and not also their hands.
One last point that stood out to me was about performative activism, when we talk about how sustainable we try to be for example on social media, which she compares to confession in the Catholic church. It is not about doing better later, it is about absolution so we can sin again (this might not be the way the church would describe it, though). But I very much see the point, and also see that this is what I have done and actually might be doing right now, writing this blog post.
Anyway, from the podcast, I went to her list of publications (as one does), and read three recent articles.
In Servant-Miklos & Noordzij (2021), they discuss the impact of sustainability education on students’ identity. Student identity is often, if at all, addressed through “oughts”, i.e. what students ought to do in order to protect the environment or stop global warming, instead of starting with whatever pre-existing identities students have.
In the article, the authors use a problem-based learning (PBL) setup on two groups of students: engineering students in one, and liberal arts and sciences in the other. Engineering students are typically used to PBL already, and they report the impact of that method as making them incorporate more perspectives on the sustainability problem they were working on. For the other group, the reported impact is more about providing a systemic view of the sustainability issue at hand.
When it comes to student identity, even after the PBL unit, the authors find a dissonance between “middle-class habitus” (where they have been socialised into expecting a “good life” that includes, for example, travel, and seeing the vanishing wonders of the world like ice bergs and corals) and moral identity (as someone who does the right thing). So while the concern for the environment was successfully embedded within students’ identities, it happened as a moral obligation (environmental care as a feature of being a good person, duty towards future generations or the Earth) rather than seeing the intrinsic value of nature. Students deal with the dissonance between what they want and what they feel they ought to want with cost-benefit calculations, where they balance the “abstract duty towards the environment” against “immediate personal fulfilment”, with immediate personal fulfilment winning every time. Even though they experience guilt about contributing to the problem, there is no willingness to stop.
Interestingly, the coping strategies with this dissonance differ between engineering students and liberal arts students. Engineering students react with attempts of threat reduction (so downplaying the severity and urgency of the crises — it is happening elsewhere, or not for my generation), bargaining (I am sorting my trash, recycling plastic, and using my bike! Since I am already “doing the small things”, this buys me the right to pollute through air travel…) and faith in technological salvation (doesn’t matter so much what we do now, there will be technological solutions to make everything good again!). Most liberal arts students, on the other hand, use blaming (not my fault, it’s the big capitalist culprits), fatalism (it’s too late now anyway), faith that society or politics will fix it, or, sometimes, engagement. Also everybody, and engineering students more strongly, thought that they would contribute to the solution in their future career, so it did not matter so much what they did now.
This is a really interesting result that reminds me of something we saw when we ran the “Climate Fresk” serious game: That engineering students tend to believe that there will soon be technology to solve all problems, and often also that they will contribute to the solution through being involved in engineering it. But this is not the result that we want if a) the perception of the problem is reduced to a simple technological challenge and b) all action is postponed and delegated to a future, imagined, role. So when designing our future PBL, we need to be careful that we do not make it too focussed on technical solutions, but actually require reflexion on the big picture and the systemic changes that are required.
[Side note for myself, because I am always curious about interesting research methods, and sometimes coming across interesting methods sparks ideas for future studies (e.g. Fyfe et al. (2021)’s ManyClasses, where “researchers examine the same research question and measure the same experimental effect across many classes spanning a range of topics, institutions, teacher implementations, and student populations” which is what we are now doing with our Bingos, or the composite fictional scenarios in Mahon & Bergin (2024), which we are exploring in a project about positionality). Anyway, in Servant-Miklos & Noordzij (2021), they use “Grounded Theory Lite”. And in Servant-Miklos et al. (2023), which is up next right below, they use a combination of free and structured analysis when listening to interviews, which I also want to keep in mind for future use! And in the last article in this blog post, they use a plan-conduct-evaluate action research approach!]
In Servant-Miklos, Holgaard, & Kolmos (2023), they do longitudinal interviews with students over 18 months ot figure out how sustainability awareness, interest and engagement develop. Interest and awareness mostly increased except in cases where the authors could explain from the student personal lives why it did not develop further (“ignorance is bliss”). The authors used different categories to describe student engagement: from private, over professional, to institutional and public. Students typically moved one or two categories “up”.
A resulting recommendation for practice is that, since awareness and interest tend to increase engagement, it would be good to expose students to the topic early on in their studies, to address identity development explicitly in PBL, and to make it visible where there are opportunities to get engaged privately, professionally, institutionally, or publicly.
But getting back to identity development: Duchi et al. (2023) find a “sweet spot” for reflection. They look at problem-oriented project work (PPL), where students define the problem and learning outcomes themselves (in contrast to “regular” PBL, where the students also define learning outcomes, but the projects are defined with learning outcomes and relevant literature in mind already, which the students then just “discover”).
Anyway, their PPL is broken into three parallel tracks, where not all tracks are active in all weeks, but all span the whole length of the project:
- a project track, in which student teams research and work on a real-world problem and design an intervention.
- an education track where students learn tools and knowledge they need for their intervention
- a reflection track
As for reflection, the authors distinguish between cognitive reflection, which is a means to process new information, combine it with already existing knowledge, and plan new learning strategies, with the main purpose being improved learning in the classroom; and critical reflection, which is about changing ones practice through uncovering unconscious motives and drives as well as group dynamics etc.. They structure the reflection in a really interested way.
Reflection in the diary guided by prompts:
- describe a learning event that was meaningful to you
- analyse your thoughts, actions and emotions triggered by the event and how they relate to your learning goals
- reflect on what you have learnt and why it is meaningful
- theorise how the learning fit with your expectations and prior knowledge
- experiment with how you might want to do things differently in the future
Reflection in workshops based on the written artifacts of the diary, using lenses learned in the education track: cognitive (based on Kolb’s learning cycle), individual, relational (drama triangle!), and societal and global.
In their research, the authors are interested in phenomenography, meaning they are exploring the variation of experiences and resulting actions in order to map an outcome space of their intervention. This resulted in 7 categories of how students describe their experiences with the reflection process, ranging from “reflection is for the teacher, it does not add any value to me”, over using and valuing it and input that others can give, to something that is too chaotic to make sense of. If these categories are mapped on two axes, breadth of reflection (self — others — world) vs depth of reflection (no reflection — reflection — reflection on reflection — reflection on reflection on reflection), the authors find that the “sweet spot” is “reflection” and “reflection on reflection”. Less is too little (obviously! It is just action without reflection), and more just becomes confusing and not useful any more (Reflection without action).
The authors point out that “students engaged in a reflection process are in a vulnerable situation of self-growth. Educators must be especially conscious not to impose their dearly held worldviews on students, but to let them grow and evolve their own.” Which is very valid, but also super difficult. They recommend a pedagogy of hope, where “hope means helping students to accept themselves as incomplete, and therefore open to a search that can be carried out in relationship with others, through the reflective praxis of problem-oriented project work.”
So to sum up, trying to compile my thoughts from these readings, I think the main thing for me is an idea is starting to form for how we can design our PBL course using those three different tracks (project, education, reflection), and by using good prompts, making sure that the reflection is actually useful and constructive, and not just hot air. The articles also reminded me again about the danger of focussing too much on technological solutions, both in what the PBL project is about, but then also when it comes to the impact on students’ identities. Since they already tend to believe that technology will fix the problem, we need to really put effort into not reinforcing this, but rather challenging it.
I have only scratched the surface of this specific author’s work, and not yet looked through her full publication list, or explored what her co-authors do in other projects, or looked at who cites them. But this leaves me very hopeful that there must be a wider body of literature out there somewhere where people are working on the same challenges we are, especially also with a focus on engineering students, and that we can learn from them, both through their published works but maybe also through reaching out and connecting in person. I can’t wait to explore this further!
Cooke, J., & Mace, N. (2020). Going for a walk: Using psychogeography to explore sustainability in art and design. In Storytelling for Sustainability in Higher Education (pp. 247-258). Routledge.
Fyfe, E. R., de Leeuw, J. R., Carvalho, P. F., Goldstone, R. L., Sherman, J., Admiraal, D., … & Motz, B. A. (2021). ManyClasses 1: Assessing the generalizable effect of immediate feedback versus delayed feedback across many college classes. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(3), 25152459211027575.
Servant-Miklos, V. F., & Noordzij, G. (2021). Investigating the impact of problem-oriented sustainability education on students’ identity: a comparative study of planning and liberal arts students. Journal of Cleaner Production, 280, 124846.
Servant-Miklos, V., Holgaard, J. E., & Kolmos, A. (2023). Sustainability Matters: The Evolution of Sustainability Awareness, Interest and Engagement in PBL Engineering Students. Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education, 11(1), 124-154.
Duchi, L., Servant-Miklos, V., Kooij, L., & Noordegraaf-Eelens, L. (2023). The “Sweet Spot” for Reflection in Problem-oriented Education: Insights From Phenomenographic Action-research. Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education, 11(1), 1-35.