Climate emotions are often discussed as individual. Although it is often suggested to talk about emotions and to find supportive community to process and deal with them (see for example the steps talk and unite here), most often there is no discussion of how emotions are shaped by society in the first place. Peters et […]
“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: […]
A lot of young people experience eco-anxiety (and old people, too, but they are not the focus of this study; but see here some numbers from Marlis’ recent talk). There are a lot of suggestions on how to cope with eco-anxiety (see the same blogpost, and also the models by Pikala, or the Hope Wheel, or […]
A very common advice, in my experience especially when we feel overworked, or struggle with climate anxiety, is that we should invest in some self-care, be kind to ourselves. Turns out, however, that this might not the best advice.
In a study of 869 students of the University of Glasgow, Hill-Harding et al. (2025) find high level of negative climate emotions: Powerlessness, helplessness, sadness, anger. Many also report impairment due to climate anxiety. When rating agreement with different statements, participants agreed strongly with statements like “People have failed to take care of the planet” […]
I’ve read and written about the importance of hope, especially when teaching for sustainability, before, and a book that always comes up in this context is Active hope by Macy & Johnstone (2022). And I finally got my hands on it (access via LUB)!
I’ve been vaguely interested in the persistence of emotions ever since Marlis’ presentation about eco-emotions since at least mine can fluctuate enormously (which makes it very hard to fill in any surveys that is asking about emotions because I never know whether they want to know how I feel right this second, or on average […]
It is extremely common that we experience strong emotions around climate change and all the other crises in the world. Some or all of these emotions are likely to come up for out students, too — because of topics in the courses we teach, or because they are informed citizens, in our classes or outside. […]
On Thursday, I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the workshop “How to deal with climate anxiety as teachers and researchers?” co-organised by the Environmental Politics Research Group (EPRG) at Lund University and the Research Group on Green Politics (REGROUP) at the University of Copenhagen, that brought together very interesting presentations, first on research […]
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 […]
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 […]
Yesterday I was one of those annoying people on their laptop during a seminar, taking notes during Maria Weurlander’s presentation on “When learning becomes difficult: Emotional challenges in education”, and then our discussions on the topic. But it was just too interesting and relevant not to!
Yesterday, a colleague pointed me to Microsoft Reflect, “A well-being app to support connection, expression, and learning”, and I had a quick play. It’s a tool to support reflection in educational settings (something that I am thinking about a lot in the context of teaching sustainability). Since it is not designed specifically for use in […]
Fear can lead to fight, flight, or freeze responses — or so we often hear. So far, I was under the impression that fear was generally not a good emotion to create in students since from what I had read, it hinders learning. But my colleague Léa recently sent me the meta-analysis by Tannenbaum et […]
When I was recently thinking about emotions and teaching about sustainability, I came across the term “emotionally-responsive teaching” that really spoke to me, even though I did not really know what it was. Trying to read more about it it turns out that maybe it isn’t as clear a concept as I had hoped, or maybe […]
In communicating about climate change specifically, and other sustainability challenges, there is often the debate around how to kickstart people into action. Paint the doom-and-gloom (i.e. realistic) picture so people will act out of fear (and I just recently wrote about how anger can be a constructive emotion leading to action), or draw more positive […]
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked to many people that are in one way or other involved in teaching about sustainability at high school or university level. One thing that has struck me is how many seem to be teaching about sustainability without actually believing that we can and will “fix” the big […]
