Tag Archives: teaching for sustainability

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

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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.

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

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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”.

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

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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…

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

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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!

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

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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…).

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Exploring PBL, reflection, student identity, and sustainability in Ginie Servant-Mikols’ work

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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 Ginie Servant-Mikols, which I found so inspiring that I listened to another interview with her, and then browsed her publication list, and turns out this is going to be super helpful for what we are planning on doing! Here are my first take-aways.

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Thinking about Storytelling in Teaching for Sustainability

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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 board a ship to start this journey of discovery together, where he will be the navigator, but we’ll need everybody’s skills and contributions to make it safely to our destination — was so cool and impressive, that I (obviously!) had to read up a bit on storytelling in higher education for sustainability! Here is my compilation of two books on the matter (that I, admittedly, mostly browsed).

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Currently reading & thinking about “The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place” (Gruenewald, 2003)

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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 thoughts from a recent seminar that Laura Weitze gave here at LU.

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Currently reading: “The Ideal Outcome of Education for Sustainability: Transformative Sustainability Learning” (Michel et al., 2020)

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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)!

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