This morning, I participated in an online seminar on “Introducing Sustainability Competencies”, run by my awesome colleagues Steven Curtis and Terese Thoni. Here are my reflections (and if you are looking for a summary: sorry, not finished writing that yet, stay tuned!).
Today, I tried two new “liberating structures” in my “teaching for sustainability” course: First the “Wicked Questions“, where we surfaced some “opposing-yet-complimentary” strategies that we need to pursue simultaneously to succeed, and then we worked towards “15% solutions“, with a focus on small changes that we have the freedom and resources to implement now. And this is how it went.
Recently, I have read a bit about how claiming to be the first to do/research/find/describe/discover/explain is really a form of colonialism, not the proof of excellence we commonly think it is.
This is just a quick and dirty mapping, but even though details can certainly be discussed, I think that there is nevertheless a striking overlap between what the Swedish law from 1993 says a student shall demonstrate for a Degree of Master of Science in Engineering, and what Redman & Wiek (2021) suggest as key competencies in sustainability.
I thought a lot, and wrote (e.g. here), about my positionality in relation to my work recently, inspired by conversations with, and nudging by, Kirsty. Below, I am posting her response to my blog post, where she shares her reflections on her own positionality and also on why and how we need to be careful with demanding, or expecting, or even just implying that we think people should be, sharing that kind of information. Definitely worth a read, thank you so much for sharing, Kirsty!
Quick summary of this month’s iEarth Journal Club article: Clinton & Smith (2009) focus on how to “make” students take on responsibility in team work through team contracts and peer evaluation, in the context of cooperative learning. My summary below, and the strong recommendation to read what Oakley et al. (2004) have to say about “Turning student groups into effective teams” (see also featured image). That latter article is really one of the most useful articles I have come across over many years of reading, including a great FAQ section, and templates.
Students can engage in higher education in different ways: behavioral, emotional, cognitive, or in any combination of those. Traditionally, this is seen as engagement with the curriculum inside the classroom, but increasingly the view of student engagement is widened to include forms where students take more ownership of their own learning, for example when becoming involved in (re)designing curriculum as student partners who are currently taking a course (or not), co-creating learning with a whole course, influencing learning on a program level (whether enrolled in the program or not), or influencing the bigger setting through engagement with services like university libraries, or in developing religious diversity training. In the book “Advancing Student Engagement in Higher Education: Reflection, Critique and Challenge”, Lowe (2023) brings together 25 chapters from 36 contributors, exploring and highlighting different aspects from very different perspectives. I am summarizing my personal main takeaways below.
Yesterday evening I joined a group of 14 teachers who met up to learn from, and support, our colleague, Ester Barinaga, who wanted to try a new game for teaching purposes and needed guinea-pigs to test it on. The topic was money: contrary to popular belief, money is not at all neutral, and what currency is available, who distributes money and how, what rules exist for trading, … have huge effects on how an economy develops. We explored different aspects through variations of a very simple setup and had space to express emotions and reflect on what happened under different conditions.
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…
The assumption that teacher-student relationships are important has been around for a long time and is probably uncontested. But when it comes to describing what exactly makes a good relationship, there is no consensus yet, and many aspects, like a sense of belonging, or the teacher caring, or trust in teachers, have been investigated. Here comes my summary of some of the relevant literature on trust that students have in teachers, and how that trust can potentially be fostered and grown.