Tag Archives: teaching for sustainability

Thinking about emotions and teaching about sustainability

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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 pictures so they feel hopeful and that they can make a difference, and therefore don’t get paralyzed?

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Breathing practice: Where freediving and academic development collide

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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 seminar on “the sustainable teacher” yesterday and one suggestion that came out of that in order to help us work towards “inner sustainability”, was to include mindfulness meditation practices in our own and our students’ lives. And this reminded me of an article I recently read on breathing practice (which I find interesting from a completely different perspective, being a hobby freediver) in comparison to mindfulness meditation, where it turns out that breathing practice can be as effective or better than mindfulness meditation. So what if we included breathing practices in our teaching?

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From “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it” (reflecting on Stein et al., 2022)

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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 with a better one yet, and I think me struggling with finding a good name is a symptom of me struggling with what the essence of that course is. I don’t want my course “just” to be about how to teach about the SDGs or problems or solutions, it needs to be bigger than that. But then how to make sure there is still a clear focus?

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Four misunderstandings about sustainability (after Block & Paredis, 2019)

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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 the contrary, I think their way of talking about sustainability is actually much more useful in teaching. My summary below.

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Currently reading: “Hope dies, action begins?” The role of hope for proactive sustainability engagement among university students. (Vandaele & Stålhammar, 2022)

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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 issues like climate, biodiversity, hunger, wars. And while I don’t have a solution to them either, I found it so disheartening to see all these teachers that talk to so many young people and that seem to have no hope for the future. Surely this cannot be the way to do things. If they don’t see the point of changing things because we are all doomed anyway, how will they support their students to develop skills and strategies to deal with all the big challenges they will be faced with?

This is where the article I’m summing up below comes in:

“Hope dies, action begins?” The role of hope for proactive sustainability engagement among university students. (Vandaele & Stålhammar, 2022)

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Currently reading: Inspiring Action, Efficacy, and Connection: Weaving Sustainability into Environmental Science Curriculum through a Connected Learning Model (Bertossi & Halliwell, 2020)

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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)

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Currently reading: “Bringing an entrepreneurial focus to sustainability education: A teaching framework based on content analysis” (Hermann & Bossle, 2019)

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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)

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