Category Archives: literature

Reading up on the purpose, pros and cons of positionality statements

Leave a reply

Reading up on more positionality statement discussions for ongoing work with Kirsty, which started from us drawing up our own positionality statements and discussing the differences [see hers and mine — and I would do mine substantially different now after a lot of thinking has gone into the topic!], and then us reading an article by Secules et al. (2021) and discussing more and more and more. Brief summaries of some literature below!

Continue reading →

Different ways students are talking about Wicked Sustainability Problems (currently reading Lönngren, Ingerman, & Svanström; 2017)

Leave a reply

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 availability in Jordan and find four typical ways students reason.

Continue reading →

Currently reading: “Carving space to learn for sustainable futures: A theory-informed adult education approach to teaching” by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024)

Leave a reply

This morning, I read the article “Carving space to learn for sustainable futures: A theory-informed adult education approach to teaching” by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024) and it really resonated with me. They write that “education for sustainability is, by necessity, value-based, place-embedded and emancipatory, seeking to help learners develop a desire to connect – to ‘actively’ be in the world and shape it” and then present a “seed package” in which they propose an activity “meant to help learners realise or gauge the responsibilities and freedoms that we have as persons in the world”.

Continue reading →

Using eco-guilt to motivate behaviour change seems not really supported by literature

Leave a reply

Following up on what I wrote on Friday about how my colleague respond to her talking about sustainability issues with “don’t make me feel guilty”, I am exploring eco-guilt as a search term that seems to produce quite a different set of results. In contrast to the literature I summarised on Friday, where guilt is described as a deactivating emotion that needs to be changed into constructive hope in order to lead to action, the studies below mostly describe guilt as an emotion that can (and should) be used to promote environmental friendly behaviour. But I do not think those studies are super convincing, so better proceed with caution here…

Continue reading →

Thinking about how to respond when people say “Don’t talk to me about sustainability, you make me feel guilty!”

1 Reply

Today one of my colleagues told me that a very common reaction she gets in her department is that people do not want to talk to her about sustainability because “that makes them feel guilty”, and also say that is why they do not want to talk about sustainability with their students. To me, that really feels like a “you” problem — how is it my, or her, problem that you feel guilty because I talk about something that matters to me? Then do better and you don’t need to feel as guilty! — but at the same time that’s probably not the most constructive approach to deal with that situation. So let’s see what the literature says what is going on and what we should do about it!

Continue reading →

Striving for accountable spaces (instead of safe or brave ones)

Leave a reply

Hearing promises of “safe spaces” is usually a quick way to get me very angry. Safe for whom? And safe from whom? Probably not safe for minorities from dominant discourses… But then calling for “brave spaces” instead does not help a lot either. Brave spaces demand bravery from everybody, so far so good, but what about those people who have to be brave to show up as themselves every single day already because of society’s reaction to who they are? Also, it should not require being brave to be heard. So then, an alternative seems to be to strive for accountable spaces. Here I am digging into some literature to see how people generally think and write about it!

Continue reading →

Currently reading Kezar (2005) on “Moving from I to We: Reorganizing for collaboration in higher education”

Leave a reply

I have recently noticed over and over again that many teachers tell us that they would love to work more collaboratively, that they are craving community, that they would like to talk through their course with someone who can provide a very different perspective on, for example, sustainability, yet it is not happening. Everybody is overworked and barely hanging on, so things that aren’t strictly necessary in the short run tend to not happen, or at least not as much as people claim they want it. Collaboration does not seem to be perceived as necessary in the short run: structures within universities are generally focussed on individual success and are often at odds with collaboration. Kezar (2005) presents eight key organizational features of institutions that support collaboration, so let’s see what we can learn from that!

Continue reading →

Learning from history. Currently reading “Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 Years of Learning for Environment and Change” (Macintyre, Tilbury, Wals; 2024)

Leave a reply

Before I started browsing this book, my gut feeling was that while it would surely be educational to read, I really did not feel like a history lesson of the last 50 years of failed education for sustainability would be empowering in any way. But that changed as I started browsing, so I decided that I would stick it out. As the authors point out, we need to know what has been tried already so that we don’t reinvent the wheel, and especially not wheels that sounded good in the past already, but that turned out to not work. So here we go with my takeaways (and I really hope that no GenAI is ever going to base anything that people might perceive as historical or other “facts” on what I am writing below…).

Continue reading →