Tag: teaching for sustainability

Sunday at the pool, waiting for my training to start, I read about the first half of the book “the existential toolkit for climate justice educators: how to teach in a burning world“.

I always advocate for talking about sustainability even when you feel not ready to do it, because I believe that not talking about things is never a good solution. But I realized in a conversation last week that I am making a lot of assumptions about how comfortable and skilled people are in moderating conversations, […]

Not gonna lie, when already the second line of an abstract contains reference to some guy-who-I-have-never-heard-of’s “conceptual distinction” of something, I find it very hard to motivate myself to continue reading. On the other hand, the title sounds so relevant that I still did it. This is my summary of what I understand from Van […]

In March, Rachel Forsyth and I were invited to give the keynote at Stockholm University’s teacher conference 2026. The conference theme was “teaching for democracy and sustainability”, and about a year before the conference, we ambitiously announced we would be talking about “Teaching for tomorrow — trust, agency and sustainability in higher education”. Now the […]

How do we teach for sustainability when the class is huge and there is a lot of content to be covered? One really nice example is described by Monger (2022), who is “teaching oceanography by engaging students in civic activism“.

This morning, I ran a workshop for university teachers called “Teaching for Sustainability: Practicing for a sustainable future through sustainable pedagogies“. You can look at all the slides here, or see some of them below together with a quick summary of what I said about them. Most of what I am writing below I have written […]

Let’s read about everybody’s favourite topic: The polycrisis! Here, I am summarizing a framework that takes “polycrisis” from buzzword to useful concept.

Fitton et al. (2026) describe a the difficulties that teachers describe in working with a project aimed at decolonizing the curriculum, and that might partly explain why there is so little progress on decolonialization.

Since listening to Gerry’s defense of his PhD thesis the other day, I have been thinking about partnership a lot, and how we need to practice partnership also in order to practice democracy. And I vaguely remembered having seen an article where the typical “ladder” is wrapped into a circle, so that rather than being […]

Late last year, we had a “Transformation Thursday” lunch on philosophy of science, led by a colleague. Now we will follow up on that with a journal club on Nagatsu et al. (2020)’s “Philosophy of science for sustainability science“.

There are often tasks that everybody agrees are important, but that for some reason do not get implemented. In Sundström & Holmberg (2018)’s paper “When implementation falters: The challenge of having peripheral issues stick in organisations” they investigate this issue in the context of information security, but I am (surprise!) mostly curious about what we […]

“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: […]

I have a bunch of articles that were recommended during our LTHEChat on teaching sustainability last year that have been sitting in a special folder, waiting for a day like today where the best thing to do (right after a dip and a looong, comfy breakfast) is to curl up on the couch and read. […]

I was recently sent Clara Hallgarth’s Master’s thesis on “Educational Methods for Fostering Sustainability Competencies: A Toolkit for Integration of Sustainable Education in Engineering” (thanks, Clara!) and really enjoyed reading it; it’s a  treasure trove of great references and even better ideas! I am summarizing my main takeaways below, but keep in mind that this […]

One reason why sustainability education is so difficult is that in contrast to many other things we routinely teach, we cannot just take some teachable product, but need to transform teaching itself. Teachers need pedagogical knowledge of sustainability, and Sandri (2022) explores what “pedagogy” even means in the context of sustainability education, because while often […]

LTH has been running Pedagogical Inspiration Conferences since 2003, with the 13th conference happening in December 2025. I was really impressed by the number (and quality!) of presentations on teaching sustainability there (see my summaries of the contributions below).

A couple of years ago, I decided that I would only initiate new projects that, in one way or another, contribute to making the world a better place. That has lead to my focus on Teaching for Sustainability. My understanding of Teaching for Sustainability is very wide — it includes both my research interest around […]

What competences do educators need to Teach for Sustainability? Corres et al. (2020) review 14 articles that describe educator competence frameworks (all of them from within Europe, but not chosen for that specific reason!). My main takeaways below! 

Today, I finally watched Anne-Kathrin Peters’ keynote at the Teaching and Learning conference at the University of Bergen (check it out here), and in it she mentions the article “Pain and pleasure in working with sustainability and transformation at a Technical University: An exploration of the role of educational developers through collaborative autoethnography” by Peters […]

Together with my colleagues Steven Curtis and Terese Thoni, I ran a workshop at the Lund University Teaching and Learning conference 2024 — and now the proceedings have been published!

On Wednesday, Robert Kordts (awesome colleague and my co-teacher on the last Teaching for Sustainability academic development course) and myself tried a new-to-us format: A “Learning and Teaching in Higher Education” chat on Bluesky! The format is simple: We wrote a blog post (see here on their website, or read on below) and prepared six questions […]

I am reading the course literature for a sustainability course that a colleague shared with me, to see if I want to use some of it in a similar course we are developing at the moment. Here are my notes to myself.

In the book “The Psychology of Collective Climate Action: Building Climate Courage” by Hamann et al. (2025), I came across Wandercoaching, a peer-coaching initiative for sustainability initiatives at universities. They share the materials they use here, and I really liked the “tools for your sustainable university” guide full of different methods — many of them […]

This article investigates five schools in Belgium and Sweden doing “open schooling”, a very specific approach to developing and conducting teaching and learning, but I think the results are still super relevant and transferable to other situations where the goal is to teach for sustainability!

Preparing for a presentation that Terese and I will be giving soon at the “Inclusive Lund University” conference on how the inclusion and sustainability communities very much want the same thing and therefore should cooperate much more than they currently do, I came across the book “All means all” and the chapter on “The Magic […]

Yesterday, we had the third meeting of our “Teaching for Sustainability” course, where participants present their early work on the projects they will develop throughout the rest of the course, and give feedback to each other. Since we had so many presentations and I didn’t want to take time away from discussions with peers, I […]

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 […]

Today, we tried a new format of our “Transformation Thursdays” (come-as-you-are informal lunch meetings where colleagues who are interested in Teaching for Sustainability can join me and Terese to chat about Teaching for Sustainability. No preparation required, but you are welcome to bring questions and topics if you like!) — first of all, it was […]

Sometimes, it is really difficult to navigate cultural expectations around teaching for sustainability. My colleague Léa and I just published a “perspectives” article about an experience in Léa’s teaching that we reflected on together.

This article sounds so relevant: How do we teach to say “no” to unethical or harmful behaviour (and, in extension, future research (which is where the authors are heading), or maybe, me thinks, participating in other collective harmful behaviour towards, for example, the climate)? This comes from a very different disciplinary context from mine, so […]

Academia and activism, how do they go together? I’ve been curious about that for a while, as evidenced by these posts. Today I came across an article that investigates not only academic activism, but activism in the classroom.

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 […]

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’m always scanning the horizon on teaching for sustainability courses online to make sure I a) keep myself up-to-date with the state of the art, and b) don’t re-invent the wheel with our upcoming MOOC. I had been waiting for this one to come online for a couple of weeks and when I checked today, […]

I have been reading a lot about care in teaching as the focus moved away from control and past belonging and mattering, so it was quite interesting to read a very similar discussion on engineering and sustainability!

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)!

Lopes & Galleli (2025) look at how what happens at universities is influenced both formal structures (policy documents, …) and the hidden curriculum (informal and implicit messaging about what is socially accepted in the context, for example through jokes). They investigated a document analysis and conducted interviews with professors and students at universities in Brazil. […]

Yesterday I posted a first draft, today I have a much more finished version for my upcoming course…

I found a new book that I would love to do a slow-reading book club on! I really enjoyed what we did with the Everyday Changemaker book, and I would love to read Kahane (2025)’s “Everyday habits for transforming systems” with a group of close colleagues so we can think through what it means for […]

Why do people fail to act against climate change, and what interventions could make them act? That’s what Sinclair et al. (2025) investigate in an “intervention tournament”!

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. […]

Palacin-Silva et al. (2018) describe a capstone project developed to integrate sustainability in software engineering education. Their course has five main aims: Understanding [something technical]; Implementing [something technical] to support the needs of an organization; Mastering [something technical] Understanding [business challenges of something technical]; and Applying [something technical]. So originally, the course was very much […]

I found another “head, hands, heart” model! This time, Calvert et al. (2022) use it as a frame to organise the key competencies for sustainability:

I’m thinking quite a lot about responsibility — of students for their learning, for example in the context of active learning and co-creation, of teachers for what they are teaching — but I actually have a long history with thinking about teaching for responsibility in a different context. My first ever publication on teaching and […]

I recently watched the TED talk “Dare to disagree” by Margaret Heffernan. It is brilliant in itself and the message to “dare to disagree” is super important, but what especially spiked my interest was her mentioning a practice in PhD defenses in the Netherlands that I had witnessed myself a long time ago, but since […]

I am currently talking a lot with LTH teachers to figure out what the thresholds are that make it difficult for them (and other teachers) to take action on changing their teaching to put a focus on sustainability (or the polycrises, or however you want to call the big challenges of our time). Teachers in […]

Rachel Lombardi et al. (2011) write “The overutilisation but simultaneous undertheorisation of sustainability as a term means that it can lend itself to a vast array of very divergent goals“. Or, in other words, as long as sustainability is just a vague buzzword, it is easy to accept, but that is because it is also […]

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!

Today I found the model by Pihkala (2022) that I think can be helpful when thinking and talking about eco-anxiety (and that I, of course, had to recreate in order to fully think through — see above).

I recently wrote about the framework of Teaching about, with, in, through, for Sustainability (which I had found in a bluesky post by Kyle Bartlett and then adapted to my own context and purpose). I have since used it in a lot of conversations and found it extremely useful to address different aspects of what […]

A very common remark when talking about Teaching for Sustainability is that it is political and we shouldn’t indoctrinate our students, hence stay away from politics, and thus from sustainability teaching. My take on that is that everything is political since politics is about how we want to live together in society, but that there […]

Recently on Bluesky, I came across a post by Bo Thomson who wrote about the article I am summarising below “I frequently had students ask “Why are we reading this in a class on …?” My answer was always the same: One day your choice of how to select, develop, or use a technology may […]

Already a month ago, my colleague and current guest professor in our group, Klara Bolander Laksov, published the column “Democracy – An Educational Mission for Higher Education” in “universitetsläraren“, the magazine of my union, the Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers.

In preparation of the next meeting of our book club, here is my summary of Part III of Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School by Venet (2024) (summary of Part I here, Part II here)!

In a recent Transformation Thursday (the monthly networking opportunity that Terese and I have started, where we sit in one of the university canteens over lunch and invite teachers wanting to talk about Teaching for Sustainability to join us), I talked about how I had recently seen the “thumb war” game intervention to show how […]

As many other places in the world, my university works with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework, and for many researchers and teachers pointing to one or two of the goals is a common justification of why their research is relevant and important. But in many cases, the SDGs are not used […]

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 […]

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 […]

In response to my post summarising Biesta’s purpose of education, my friend Terese sent me a speech David Orr gave in 1990 with a very similar vibe. Even though the details of the situation have changed since 1990 (and very much not for the better), the overall message is still as relevant now as it […]

In preparation of the next meeting of our book club, here is my summary of Part II of Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School by Venet (2024) (summary of Part I here)!

27 curious teachers joined Ola Leifler‘s demonstration of large-scale social simulations (“Megagames”) yesterday. Can you imagine playing a game with 180 people in individual roles for a full day? Me not really, but at least a little bit more after yesterday’s demonstration. On the image above you see part of the setup: There were three […]

I have written about this, my current favourite book, repeatedly before, while I was reading it for the first time (blog post 1, 2, and 3), but here comes a slightly more deliberate summary for the purpose of a book club that will run from now until summer, with three meetings to discuss the three […]

Our experience with how students argue in the Climate Fresk serious game is that they often jump to technical solutions to climate change right away and are unwilling to even entertain the thought of any other approach. Someone will invent something, and that will fix everything (false hope that does not lead to action, as […]

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 […]

What are the barriers to including sustainability into courses and curricula at Lund University? Lidgren, Rodhe and Huisingh (2006) start from the premise that universities have an important role to play, “the state of the world is not the work of ignorant people, but rather the opposite, the result of work made by people with […]

I am in the brainstorming phase of a super cool project where we are planning to collaborate on; giving an academic development course in two countries simultaneously, teaching both online with everybody, and in person at the two hubs. I have always liked the combination of online and in-person teaching!

I now finished reading Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice in School” (where I understood that “the process is the point“, and where then helpful tools like “Vent diagrams” were introduced). Now, reading the third part of the book felt so empowering. The Talmud quote that I modified for this post’s title, […]

My most loyal guest poster strikes again! Welcome Kirsty Dunnett, today writing about Galløe (2023)’s chapter on how emotions differentiate opportunities.

When my friend Robert sent me the link to a MOOC on “Paths of Transformation: Sustainability in Higher Education” (in German only, sorry!) yesterday, I jumped at the opportunity to take it. Here are some reflections.

I’m continuing my reading of Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” (online access for LU!). I first wrote about the first couple of pages here. In a nutshell, my main take-away then was that “the process is the point”. We cannot achieve healing and justice in school (which is what […]

Yesterday, I talked to someone about Sustainability Communication and what we should be teaching our students, and I was honestly expecting something like the Karpman Drama Triangle (see featured image) or something of that sort. Plus of course more sophisticated models. But turns out that Sustainability Communication is a much big field than I realized! […]

Yesterday, I attended the Grand Seminar on “Exploring the complexities and potentials of environmental communication” organised by LU Sustainability Forum, BECC and MERGE at Lund University that my friend Terese had invited me to, and I am glad I did!

I picked up my copy of Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” this morning and I loved the book before I even started reading the introduction, because one sentence in the acknowledgements (that I was going to skip) caught my eye: “writing from bed is a time-honored […] way of […]

After writing about “Teaching about, with, in, through, for sustainability?” last night, writing about Engineering Education as Sustainable Development seems to be the logical next step. This is a summary of Narong (2024)’s framework.

This morning on the bus I was browsing bluesky, and came across a post by Kyle Bartlett, suggesting a framework for how to think about Education for Sustainable Development with, for, in, about, and through sustainable development (see below).

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Inspired by Robert’s Climate Activism 101 course, I have become more and more interested in reading about non-violent protests and understanding how they work.

I am currently in the early stages of co-developing a course, most likely project-based, on sustainability for engineering students. I have written a lot about how I am trying to make sense of key competencies in sustainability and how to assess them, but then I recently stumbled across a Future Learning Design podcast interview  with […]

I am on the fringes of a course on “Integrating Sustainability Competences in the Curriculum” that my awesome colleague Steven Curtis is currently teaching. And the way he introduces the course — in an audio file, where he (with seagulls screaming in the background) tells the story of us meeting on a dock, ready to […]

I am on the fringes of a course on “Integrating Sustainability Competences in the Curriculum” that my awesome colleague Steven Curtis is currently teaching, and he asked me to read an article about “A critical pedagogy of place” (Gruenewald, 2003) and moderate a discussion about it. Below, I am summarizing the article and adding some […]

I have written about transformative experiences (wave watching! When you suddenly see the world with new eyes) and transformative learning (with my favourite head-hands-heart model) before, but here comes the transformative sustainability learning theory (Michel et al., 2020)!

In this post, I am bringing together a bunch of thoughts and literature, and try to provide an idea of how to assess key competencies in sustainability. Wish me luck! And I welcome feedback! :-)

“Sustainable assessment” is about making assessment useful to learning beyond the frame of the course it is related to, not just in terms of retaining the learnt information and skills for longer, but to support future learning. Resource-intensive courses or practices might become more sustainable if they have far-reaching consequences beyond just the course, and […]

I am taking the open “Climate Activism 101” course, organised by Robert Kordts for Scientist Rebellion Bergen. Here, I am summarising my impressions and take-aways from the first meeting today!

After having thought a lot about what we need to teach our students in terms of sustainability competencies, what is it that teachers actually need to know, be able do, be, in order to be able to do it? Of course there are also frameworks for this! Here I am summarising the UNECE (2012) framework.

I am really late to the party of “doughnut economics”, but I just discovered this great conversation starter on sustainability!

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 — […]

Current goal: Figuring out how to do assessment of sustainability competencies for a pass/fail course (where the fail option is an actual option*).

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I have previously summarised the first part of the book “Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives” by Vare, Lausselet, & Rieckmann (2022), and here are some take-aways from part two & three.

Continuing my mission of “I am reading it so you don’t have to” on a new book: Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives by Vare, Lausselet, & Rieckmann (2022). This is my summary of their Part I, and I was really positively surprised by how much I enjoyed reading the book so far, […]

Teaching about sustainability is teaching about a (or many) wicked problem(s), and that is a challenge for teachers for many reasons. We need to, for example, teach how to work with wicked problems in general (although there is some helpful literature out there that we can start from). But when doing this, we need to […]

I really really really recommend that you read this book, but if you are short on time, check out my summary posts (part I, IIA, IIB, IIIA, IIIB) or the blogpost below for a super boiled-down summary of my takeaways from the whole book. I really enjoyed reading this book, especially because of its focus […]

Last night I watched a lecture by Dougald Hine. It is part of an online course on Higher Education Didactics for Sustainability that I did not take myself, but that I have been at the fringes off for a while now, looking at the public parts of the course on their learning management system, and […]

“Hi Claude, I want to plan a 45 minute workshop for university teachers with the title “how do I cultivate joy, passion, and purpose in my teaching, and how do I share it with my students?”. The goal is for the participants to leave the workshop feeling a renewed sense of joy, passion, and purpose […]

This blogpost is mostly a note to myself so that I don’t have to search for the database of methods for non-violent protest and persuasion next time I need it! Almost 200 methods, what a treasure for inspiration! They are grouped into “protest and persuasion”, “non-cooperation” and “intervention” (getting more and more confrontational), each with […]

Time for another iEarth Journal Club article summary, this time about authenticity in assessment!

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 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 […]

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 […]

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…

Yesterday was the first meeting of this spring’s installment of my “teaching for sustainability” course and it is so inspiring and energizing to meet so many motivated and engaged teachers! Here is what we did.

We put a lot of effort into teaching for sustainability, but whether or not we are actually successful in doing so remains unclear until we figure out a way to operationalise learning outcomes and, obviously, ways to assess them. Below, I am summarising two articles to get a quick idea of how one might do […]

My friend Sigrid does short interviews with trainers and facilitators on her company Memogic‘s youtube channel, and I watched the interview with Inna Fischer (in German) yesterday. Inna’s energy was super inspiring, and she mentioned the “Liberating Structures”, which I then realized I had never blogged about before. So here we go!

Implementing education for sustainability throughout an institution is a huge challenge, so I am currently reading up on what we might be able to learn from other places. Högfeldt et al. (2023) report on how since 2011, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, has gradually implemented sustainable development in their programs and culture.

Teaching for sustainability is about so much more than teaching the content and skills described in the SDGs, or even the cross-cutting sustainability competencies. Today, I talked with teachers who asked what they could do in their courses where the curriculum does not mention anything related to sustainability, and if they should even do anything. […]

Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, and the first part and second part of the summary of “PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches”, and my first part of a summary of PART III — Designing and implementing teaching and learning practices here comes my last bit […]

Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, and the first part and second part of the summary of “PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches”, here comes my summary of PART III — Designing and implementing teaching and learning practices

Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, and the first part of the summary of part II, here comes the second summary post on PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches

Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, here comes PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches

I am teaching the course “teaching sustainability” again in March, and while my course has a very applied focus on the questions teachers bring themselves into it, I have been looking around at how other places teach similar courses. I saw that the course in Stockholm assigns the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and […]

As we are getting ready to officially launch our new blog on “teaching about sustainability”, I am revisiting posts on this blog and rewriting them for the different outlet. And one of the first ones I wrote was about the “head-hands-heart” framework. I’m reposting what I wrote for the other blog below, but then I […]

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 […]

Here comes my informal summary of today’s seminar on “Serious Games in Teaching Sustainability”. A more formal summary will go through the official channels shortly (or that’s the plan… :-))

Last week I had the pleasure to work with “real” students (“real” in contrast to the teachers that I typically work with) and it gave me so much energy* to meet such wonderful young people (wow, I feel old). But it’s true! I facilitated the Biodiversity Collage and that gave me new motivation to read […]

How can we imagine future universities that are less market-driven and more socially just, focussed on community and sustainability? Possibly by using a different metaphor, that of ecology, according to Kinchin (2023), who also suggests five “moves” that would be required to move towards an ecological university. A super interesting perspective! (Thanks for sharing this […]

As you’ve seen from my recent Biodiversity Collage posts, I have gotten into serious games as tools for teaching. Today, I am reading up on a different game, the Climate Fresk (which I also got introduced to when I got to play it in a workshop led by my awesome colleague Léa Lévy, and which […]

Came across this model, had to share! You know I love me a good visualization of a model, and I think this one is brilliant to help support thinking about sustainability teaching in a holistic way!

What competencies should we be teaching students so they will be best equipped to work towards a sustainable future? The (really useful, me thinks!) Redman & Wiek (2021) framework.

I’m now an official trained facilitator of the Biodiversity Collage (that I wrote about here)!

My awesome LTH colleague Léa Lévy invited me to a workshop she was doing with some of her colleagues yesterday, where we played a serious game on biodiversity in order to test if it might work as a teaching tool in their context. The game, “The Biodiversity Collage“, is about collaboratively organizing a growing deck of […]

Especially when it comes to teaching about climate change or sustainability more generally, it seems unavoidable to really consider mental states. While the dominant discourse around climate change has been about external, biophysical factors for a long time, and climate change was thus seen as a challenge that can be solved by technology and policy changes […]

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 […]

Talking about sustainability teaching, one model that seems to resonate with many teachers I speak with is the “Head, hands, heart” model by Sipos et al. (2008). I came across basically the same thing now in an article by Öhman & Sund (2021) as a model for sustainability commitment.

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 […]

I recently wrote a lot about the emotions that we experience when really thinking about sustainability and the challenges that we face when we take it seriously (e.g. here), and of course experiencing negative emotions like feeling anxious or hopeless or angry is not only happening to our students, but also to us. I attended a […]

A lot of things are happening around teaching sustainability at LU right now! As I am planning the second iteration of my “teaching sustainability” course, I am reading more about what we actually mean by “teaching sustainability”. It is clear that this is not a good title for my course, but we haven’t come up […]

One thing I find irritating in many conversations around how to teach about sustainability is that they tend to get hung up on what “sustainability” actually means. So I got pretty excited when I found this article by Block & Paredis (2019), arguing for actually not needing a “waterproof and objective definition” of sustainability; on […]

One reoccurring topic in all discussions around how to teach sustainability is how we can turn frustration into constructive action. I haven’t found a comprehensive answer, but I’ve been reading!

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 […]

Yesterday, in our “collegial project course: teaching sustainability”, I showed two models of how one might approach thinking about teaching sustainability, and here is another one that I quite like, from the article Inspiring Action, Efficacy, and Connection: Weaving Sustainability into Environmental Science Curriculum through a Connected Learning Model (Bertossi & Halliwell, 2020)

A lot of the work I am doing at LTH is related in one way or other to teaching (to teach) sustainability. Here are some notes on an article I found helpful: “Achieving transformative sustainability learning: engaging head, hands and heart” Sipos, Battisti & Grimm (2008)

A lot of the work I am doing at LTH is related in one way or other to teaching (how to teach) sustainability, so here are my notes on an article I recently read and found interesting: “Bringing an entrepreneurial focus to sustainability education: A teaching framework based on content analysis” (Hermann & Bossle, 2019)