The book Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education, edited by Howson & Kingsbury (2024) has been opened on my desktop literally since the day it was published. And in an attempt to manage work load while still reading most of what I want to read, I picked the two chapters that had the most interesting titles and I’m summarising those below.
Since on one of her first slides (and here is a link to the slides that contains links to all resources mentioned below, too) last night, Karen Costa invited participants to engage and share resources via all kinds of channels (in the chat, backchannel, tweets, posts, during the webinar and folks watching the recording — I love an explicit call to action like that!), here are the points and resources that I want to remember and that might be useful for you, too!
Current goal: Figuring out how to do assessment of sustainability competencies for a pass/fail course (where the fail option is an actual option*).
My friend Frauke recommended I listen to the episode “Why don’t we have a 15-hour work week” of The Happiness Lab podcast, and I recommend you do, too! Here are my main takeaways (but you should really listen to the episode yourself, they have a great way of making their points!).
As I wrote recently when discussing frameworks for sustainability competencies, intrapersonal competencies have only recently been added as integral parts to the common frameworks. Today, I am summarising an article by Libertson (2023) on “Inner transitions in higher education in Sweden: incorporating intra-personal skills in education for sustainable development”.
I like using the Redman & Wiek (2021) framework for sustainability competencies that shows sustainability competencies relating to each other as well as to disciplinary content and generic competencies. But in an article they wrote 10 years before (Wiek et al., 2011), they show a graphic that I have re-imagined here, and where I included integration & intrapersonal competences, that only made it into their framework later but that are needed throughout, because obviously all competences need to play together, and this needs to happen in a way that does not lead into burnout. They are also included in a version of the Wiek et al., (2011) framework that Brundiers et al. (2021) published.
I think a visualisation like this one of where the different sustainability competencies become relevant in any work towards a sustainable future can be very helpful in curriculum planning when looking at how to weave sustainability competencies through all activities and assessment!
Over the summer, I have read a lot about sustainability competencies. But I still find it really difficult to implement them into curricula (or build curricula around them from scratch), so the article “Implementing competence orientation: Towards constructively aligned education for sustainable development in university-level teaching-and-learning” by Wilhelm et al. (2019) sounds like it could be useful there!
I’m currently preparing for several consulting projects where I’ll be supporting groups of teachers with developing their teaching to include a focus on sustainability competencies, so I am looking through what other people have done and what I can learn from that. Today, the “you have a part to play” toolkit for higher education for sustainability (Meerkerk, de Mul & Broekhaus; 2024).
Bolander Laksov et al. (2022) designed a program “to support teams of clinical teachers to build capacity to lead educational change based on educational research in their clinical environments” to run over a year with 8 half-day workshops that each included preparatory tasks. Three years later, three of the five projects are still going strong, so let’s read about how they did that!
I’ve claimed that for years (for example with wave watching, with active lunch breaks, with tweeting about course content), but now I read the current iEarth Journal Club article that makes the exact same point and explains it with expectancy-value theory. See my 2014 summary of Hulleman & Harackiewicz (2009), or even better, read the 2-page-long original article!
Hulleman, C. S., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2009). Promoting interest and performance in high school science classes. science, 326(5958), 1410-1412.