Currently reading Orr (1991) on “what is education for?”
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…
Tag: teaching for sustainability
Slow reading of “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” by Venet (2024), Part II
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)…
Megagames demo with Ola Leifler
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…
Slow reading of “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” by Venet (2024)
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…
Reading Pleasants et al. (2023, 2024) on technoskepticism
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…
“An active academia for peace and sustainability” Hattle et al. (2025), and about constructive hope and doubt (Marlon et al., 2019)
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,…
“Teachers should be allowed to be learners”! Currently reading Lidgren et al. (2006)
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…
Reading about design principles for blended learning
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…
It is not up to us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it
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…
Kirsty Dunnett on Galløe (2023)’s “emotions differentiate opportunities”
My most loyal guest poster strikes again! Welcome Kirsty Dunnett, today writing about Galløe (2023)’s chapter on how emotions differentiate opportunities.
My learning diary for the MOOC “Paths of transformation: sustainability in higher education”
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…
Currently reading Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School”
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.…
Currently reading and thinking about Sustainability Communication
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)…
Some thoughts on yesterday’s Grand Seminar “Exploring the complexities and potentials of environmental communication”
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…
The process is the point.
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…
Currently reading Narong (2024): “A system-based framework for engineering education as sustainable development”
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…
Teaching about, with, in, through, for sustainability?
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,…
Different ways students are talking about Wicked Sustainability Problems (currently reading Lönngren, Ingerman, & Svanström; 2017)
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…
Currently reading: “Carving space to learn for sustainable futures: A theory-informed adult education approach to teaching” by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024)
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…
Using eco-guilt to motivate behaviour change seems not really supported by literature
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…
Thinking about how to respond when people say “Don’t talk to me about sustainability, you make me feel guilty!”
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…
Learning from history. Currently reading “Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 Years of Learning for Environment and Change” (Macintyre, Tilbury, Wals; 2024)
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…
Reading up on how climate protests work
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.
Exploring PBL, reflection, student identity, and sustainability in Ginie Servant-Miklos’ 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…
Thinking about Storytelling in Teaching for Sustainability
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…
Currently reading & thinking about “The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place” (Gruenewald, 2003)
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…
Currently reading: “The Ideal Outcome of Education for Sustainability: Transformative Sustainability Learning” (Michel et al., 2020)
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…
Attempting to Assess Key Competencies in Sustainability
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!…
Currently reading: “Sustainable assessment revisited” (Boud & Soler, 2016)
“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…
Taking the course “Climate Activism 101”
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!
UNECE “Competences for educators in education for sustainable development”
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,…
Using Kate Raworth’s “doughnut of social and planetary boundaries” to kickstart sustainability conversations?
I am really late to the party of “doughnut economics”, but I just discovered this great conversation starter on sustainability!
Thoughts on a webinar on “Climate Action Pedagogy (CAP): Working with Sustainable and Inner Development Goals” by Karen Costa
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…
Thinking about assessing sustainability competencies
Current goal: Figuring out how to do assessment of sustainability competencies for a pass/fail course (where the fail option is an actual option*).
Inner development and mindfulness at university (reading Libertson, 2023)
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…
Sustainability competences, what they mean and when we need them (loosely after Wiek, Redman, and colleagues)
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…
Currently reading “Implementing competence orientation: Towards constructively aligned education for sustainable development in university-level teaching-and-learning” (Wilhelm et al., 2019)
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),…
Browsing the “you have a part to play” toolkit for higher education for sustainability (Meerkerk, de Mul & Broekhaus; 2024)
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…
Summary part 2&3 of “Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives” (Vare, Lausselet, Rieckmann, 2022)
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…
Summary part 1 of “Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives” (Vare, Lausselet, Rieckmann, 2022)
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…
Currently reading “Academic identities and teaching wicked problems: how to ‘shoot a fog’ in a complex landscape” (McCune et al., 2024)
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…
In a nutshell: “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
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…
Thinking about sustainable futures, inspired by a recorded lecture by Dougald Hine
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…
Planning an academic development workshop with GAI Claude
“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…
Database of Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion
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!…
Currently reading about authenticity in assessment (Ajjawi et al., 2024)
https://imoox.at/mooc/course/view.php?id=969§ion=4Time for another iEarth Journal Club article summary, this time about authenticity in assessment!
Reflections on a seminar on “Introducing Sustainability Competencies”
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…
The paradoxes we are confronted with when teaching for sustainability, and attempts at dealing with them, using Liberating Structures
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…
Exploring another serious game for teaching for sustainability
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…
Currently reading about wicked problems in teaching for sustainability
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…
Recap of the first meeting of my new course “Teaching for Sustainability”
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!…
Operationalising and assessing sustainability competencies (some ideas from Wiek et al. (2016) and Redman et al. (2020))
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…
“Liberating structures: Engaging everyone to build a good life together” (Lipmanowicz et al., 2015) — go read it and try them!
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…
Currently reading Högfeldt et al. (2023): “Leadership, support and organisation for academics’ participation in engineering education change for sustainable development”
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…
Recommended reading: “Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity” (Tanner, 2013)
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…
Currently reading Part III of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
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…
Currently reading Part III of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
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…
Currently reading Part II of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
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…
Currently reading Part II of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
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
Currently reading Part I of the book “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)
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…
Applying the Head-Hands-Heart framework to my “teaching sustainability” course
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…
Currently reading about how appealing to fear is effective in positively influencing behavior, and hardly ever backfires (Tannenbaum et al., 2015). Who would have thought?
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…
Our seminar today: “Serious Games in Teaching for Sustainability”
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… :-))
Facilitating the Biodiversity Collage and reading more about serious games in teaching about sustainability
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…
Currently reading: “Five moves towards an ecological university” by Kinchin (2023)
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…
Another serious game for teaching sustainability that I like: the Climate Fresk
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…
Currently reading “Bicycle model on climate change education: Presenting and evaluating a model.” by Cantell et al., 2019
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…
Currently reading: “Competencies for advancing transformations towards sustainability” (Redman & Wiek, 2021)
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 can now facilitate the “Biodiversity Collage”!
I’m now an official trained facilitator of the Biodiversity Collage (that I wrote about here)!
“The Biodiversity Collage” — a fun and collaborative workshop to explore the biodiversity crisis, but leave hopeful and ready to tackle the challenge
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…
Wamsler et al. (2021)’s literature review on “Linking internal and external transformation for sustainability and climate action”, and “Inner Development Goals”
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…
Emotionally-responsive teaching
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…
More “head, hands, and heart” in sustainability education, this time by Öhman & Sund (2021)
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…
Thinking about emotions and teaching about sustainability
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…
Breathing practice: Where freediving and academic development collide
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…
From “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it” (reflecting on Stein et al., 2022)
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…
Four misunderstandings about sustainability (after Block & Paredis, 2019)
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…
Teaching sustainability: Reading about how to turn frustration into action
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!
Currently reading: “Hope dies, action begins?” The role of hope for proactive sustainability engagement among university students. (Vandaele & Stålhammar, 2022)
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…
Currently reading: Inspiring Action, Efficacy, and Connection: Weaving Sustainability into Environmental Science Curriculum through a Connected Learning Model (Bertossi & Halliwell, 2020)
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,…
Currently thinking about: Transformative sustainability learning
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…
Currently reading: “Bringing an entrepreneurial focus to sustainability education: A teaching framework based on content analysis” (Hermann & Bossle, 2019)
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…