As some of you might be aware, we have been building up the initiative Teaching for Sustainability (the group that is running this blog, inviting you to Transformation Thursdays*, organizing the book club, and much more — see all of our activities here!) since 2023. What you might not see so much are the strategic considerations “behind the scenes”. We are working with the concept of “Communities of Practice”, which has been established by Wenger (1998) to explain how learning in organisations happen based on shared interests, practices, and relationships. We have initially followed Wenger et al. (2002)’s suggestions for how to cultivate such a community of practice, and over time developed different activities that to emerged as meaningful. We try to understand what types of activities or support teachers want and need in order to add the most value to the community.
In the article “Two years of the initiative Teaching for Sustainability at Lund University – understanding challenges and exploring opportunities” (Glessmer et al., 2025), we present our theoretical approach and the kind of data we have used to support the ongoing development of this Community of Practice. We wrote this in 2024 and it came out in late 2025, but it is still relevant if you want to find out more about the origins of, and considerations behind, this initiative.
Of course, things have been evolving since. We have collected more data (some of which we have presented at the recent LTH teaching and learning conference, see summary here, and more that we are in the process of writing up), and of course new data and new ideas always inform how we approach this initiative.
If you think these are interesting concepts, data and ideas to toy with, you are very welcome to get in touch with us and contribute — to analyzing the needs of our community, evaluating ongoing efforts, or planning next steps!
*Transformation Thursdays are monthly invitations to meet with us and other educators interested in teaching for sustainability over lunch in one of the campus restaurants. Sometimes we have a topic (like recently poetry-for-sustainability or philosophy of science), often we just meet and anyone is welcome to bring something they would like to talk about or just come and see where the conversation leads to. If you are interested to join us and want to be informed about upcoming Transformation Thursdays, please join our MS Teams through this link General | Community of Practice (TfS) | Microsoft Teams or contact us to be added to the email list.
Glessmer, M. S., Curtis, S., Thoni, T. (2025). Two years of the initiative Teaching for Sustainability at Lund University – understanding challenges and exploring opportunities. In: Connecting Teachers – Changing from Within. Proceedings from the 2024 Lund University Conference on Teaching and Learning. Editors: Johanna Bergqvist Rydén and Marita Ljungqvist. Lund University. ISBN: 978-91-90055-50-2; DOI: https://doi.org/10.37852/oblu.343.c766
Access the whole book online here: https://books.lub.lu.se/catalog/view/343/521/2123
