hope – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Currently reading Williams & Grain (2025) on “Teaching in a Time of Climate Collapse: From “An Education in Hope” to a Praxis of Critical Hope”

mglessmer — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:31:31 +0000

“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: […]

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Currently reading: “Stories of hope: reimagining education”

mglessmer — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:57:16 +0000

I recently started the daily practice of reading the book “Stories of hope: reimagining education” (first blog post here), and this is how it continues from day 4 to day 11 (and where I take a break for the foreseeable future to focus on rest and recovery). Day 4 still, chapter 7: “Becoming wildly nomadic […]

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Currently reading: “Stories of hope: reimagining education”

mglessmer — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 14:27:35 +0000

I am challenging myself to read one chapter of “Stories of hope: reimagining education” per day. Here is how it has been going for the first 4 days! In this series, I am summarising the “stories of hope”, but I am also reflecting on the practice of daily reading. I started out by collecting the […]

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Currently reading Finnegan & d’Abreu (2024) on “The hope wheel: a model to enable hope-based pedagogy in Climate Change Education”

mglessmer — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 13:10:44 +0000

We are discussing more and more about the importance of hope when talking about climate change and general sustainability questions, and I wrote about different approaches before (for example, Webb (2013)’s five types of hope, which are patient, critical, sound, resolute, and transformative hope, and Macy & Johnstone (2022)’s Active Hope). And now here is […]

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Currently reading about “Active hope” (Macy & Johnstone, 2022)

mglessmer — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:52:27 +0000

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)! They write that “At the heart of this book is a […]

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The Spiral of Silence, or why it is so difficult to talk about sustainability (updated)

mglessmer — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:00:04 +0000

I like using the “Spiral of Silence” when talking about why it is so difficult to talk about sustainability, so here comes an updated version! The idea for the “Spiral of Silence” is borrowed from a thesis about climate change conversations with children by Crease & Singhasaneh (2023), but I think it is a very […]

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Reflections on the workshop “Pedagogy of Hope” by Diana Holmqvist

mglessmer — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:48:45 +0000

On Friday, I participated in a workshop on the “pedagogy of hope”, that Diana Holmqvist from Linköping University ran. Since she is one of the two authors of my current favourite article on “carving space to learn for sustainable futures“, I absolutely wanted to attend despite feeling overwhelmed and overworked and close to burnout. And […]

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“An active academia for peace and sustainability” Hattle et al. (2025), and about constructive hope and doubt (Marlon et al., 2019)

mglessmer — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 07:55:48 +0000

After following the journey of my voting letter in the tracking app for more than a week and seeing that it did not make it to Sunday’s election on time, here are some things that give me hope today. First, and importantly, seeing how Kiel, where my letter should have gone, has voted even though […]

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

mglessmer — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 08:16:18 +0000

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 […]

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

mglessmer — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:24:02 +0000

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 […]

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