Teaching about sustainability is teaching about a (or many) wicked problem(s), and that is a challenge for teachers for many reasons. We need to, for example, teach how to work with wicked problems in general (although there is some helpful literature out there that we can start from). But when doing this, we need to […]
As part of my “Teaching for Sustainability” course, participants find & summarize articles that are relevant for developing their own teaching. From their summaries, the two articles below on using “wicked problems” in teaching for sustainability seemed so interesting that I had to go and read (and summarize) them myself…
When teaching for sustainability, we need to give students the chance to practice working with Wicked Problems, and we as teachers need to figure out where they are at in terms of thinking about the problem itself, possible solutions, and the way there. Lönngren, Ingerman & Svanström (2017) investigate this in the context of water […]
Quality assurance at universities is often oversimplified: Single events, captured in indicators that rely on one facet, are met with quick interventions, without any understanding of the complexities of the situation or longer term strategies. This leads to flip-flopping between states, for example getting rid of student group works because students report to not like […]
I am thinking about this for students in year 4/5 in the context of a sustainability course where we challenge them to question a lot of assumptions that they have met throughout most of their studies. We want a course-wide code of conduct, and then group contracts within each project group.
Innovation seems to still be one of the favourite buzzwords around, and in teaching, it often means fancier technology, larger group sizes that purportedly have even better learning outcomes, and all of that, of course, based in evidence showing typically large numbers of some sort. In this framing, Thirkell (2026) writes, “[p]edagogical innovation risks becoming […]
“Sustainability educators face a conundrum in the midst of climate collapse: what if to teach truthfully is to break hearts? What if teaching with the most current and rigorous research is tantamount to inducing hopelessness, anger, and anxiety?” This is the introduction to Williams and Grain (2025)’s article “Teaching in a Time of Climate Collapse: […]
LTH has been running Pedagogical Inspiration Conferences since 2003, with the 13th conference happening in December 2025. I was really impressed by the number (and quality!) of presentations on teaching sustainability there (see my summaries of the contributions below).
I’m always scanning the horizon on teaching for sustainability courses online to make sure I a) keep myself up-to-date with the state of the art, and b) don’t re-invent the wheel with our upcoming MOOC. I had been waiting for this one to come online for a couple of weeks and when I checked today, […]
I found a new book that I would love to do a slow-reading book club on! I really enjoyed what we did with the Everyday Changemaker book, and I would love to read Kahane (2025)’s “Everyday habits for transforming systems” with a group of close colleagues so we can think through what it means for […]
One way to help students engage with what they value and believe themselves, and how values and beliefs and interests influence what positions people take, might be setting up a role play, where students take on roles that they might find themselves in in the future. I do not have a lot of experiences with […]
In “Emerging learning environments in engineering education” by Hadgraft & Kolmos (2020), which my colleague recommended I read, the authors state that “engineering institutions might be falling behind in re-thinking the entire curriculum for educating students to handle complex situations. Most commonly, changes are made at the single course level which leads to a lack […]
I have written about this, my current favourite book, repeatedly before, while I was reading it for the first time (blog post 1, 2, and 3), but here comes a slightly more deliberate summary for the purpose of a book club that will run from now until summer, with three meetings to discuss the three […]
Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, and the first part and second part of the summary of “PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches”, and my first part of a summary of PART III — Designing and implementing teaching and learning practices here comes my last bit […]
I am teaching the course “teaching sustainability” again in March, and while my course has a very applied focus on the questions teachers bring themselves into it, I have been looking around at how other places teach similar courses. I saw that the course in Stockholm assigns the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and […]
Since sustainable development is a wicked problem, it is not too surprising that also students in our classes come with different ideas of how to meet the challenges, and that that can lead to conflicts. I am doing some reading around how people deal with this in response to a colleague asking me what to […]
