The vast majority of us relates to money as a thing that we either have or we don’t have and that, regardless of our economising efforts, few seem to have enough of. We see money as neutral, the instrument we use to buy and sell, borrow and pay-back, save and spend. Having black-boxed money, we are unable to see that its internal design, the rules that determine how it is created, what for and by whom, how it is introduced into the economy and how it is withdrawn shape individual behaviour and social dynamics. Indeed, the internal design of today’s conventional money is at the root of many of our sustainability challenges, from growing socio-economic inequality, to recurring economic booms and busts, and climate change. But if money is designed, it can be redesigned so as to project us into a more sustainable future.
This is at the core of the course “Re-imagining money for a sustainable future” that I teach at LUSEM. When that lesson is taught with reference to the macro-scale, it often feels too abstract for students to fully comprehend. So, in an effort to help students feel and see the extent to which money’s design shapes society, I had been for a while considering introducing into the course a Money Game developed by monetary activist Matthew Slater (see here). I had however never seen the game being played, and so I felt unsure of how it worked, what sort of discussions it would lead to or how better to play it within the context of a classroom. Fortunately for me, the energetic, curious and playful group “Serious Gaming” within the inter-faculty initiative “Teaching for Sustainability” at Lund University were willing to be guinea-pigs.
For two hours, 14 colleagues from around campus enthusiastically took their roles in economies using variously designed monies. With simple means (two decks of cards, a bag of hazelnuts and a few square orange pieces of papers), we simulated four different economies: one organised through barter; a second organised through Chartalist money issued by the king and injected into the economy selectively through a minority of people; money issued through loans to whoever was willing to pay those loans back with an interest (similar to today’s conventional money); and a fourth economy where money was introduced by a central authority through payment of Universal Basic Income.
It turned out my new-found colleagues across campus were not only very lively players, they were also sharply reflective of money. They observed with keen detail how the various money game rules had led them to different trading strategies; they described the feelings of anxiety of not being able to “make it” in one scenario vs the feeling of tranquility developed as they played in another scenario; depending on the scenario played, they showed competitive vs caring behaviours. Through playing, I understood what sorts of discussions the game arises and I could expect in the classroom as well as the panoply of feelings it would awake in students. And much more. Beyond the topic lessons learnt through the game, they gave me excellent feed-back on how to improve the logistics (for instance annotate not only the inequality effects of the various monetary designs but also the amount of debt each had ended up with – after repayment – as well as how much each had managed to produce – in the form of families of four equal cards).
All in all – a seriously fun evening, and an inspiring crowd I hope to continue playing with.
Are you interested in joining similar events? Then make sure to join our Teams team so you don’t miss any future events!
Liberating Structures were developed to “engag[e] everyone to build a good life together” (Lipmanowicz et al., 2015). They are a collection of methods that can “unleash the collective intelligence of the entire community of students”, by organising space and air time in such a way that everybody is equally invited to contribute and that is facilitated such that all voices are heard, and that ideas are evaluated based on their merit and not on who had them. Being heard and seen makes participants feel valued and included, and that contributes to motivation to keep going even with difficult tasks. That is exactly what we want in teaching for sustainability — both for its effect on motivation, but also because in a sustainable world, all voices are valued and included in the discussions, and ideas are evaluated independently of status or other markers of whom they came from.
The individual methods are not rocket science, the easiest one (“1-2-4-all”) is basically a version of think-pair-(2-pairs-together)-share (one of the equitable classroom techniques that I wrote about the other day). Here are two other methods that we used in our “Teaching for Sustainability” course last week (but check out the full collection at Liberating Structures, too):
Impromptu Networking
Impromptu Networking (see also figure below) is an alternative to the classical introduction round where some few people take up a lot of airtime, others are too stressed about what they are going to say when it is their turn to listen to the previous speakers, the teacher sees their time management imploding, and many are overwhelmed by all the information coming at them from all sides. In Impromptu Networking, on the other hand, participants only talk for a few minutes in three rounds of pairs, and focussed on their expectations for the meeting, what they hope to contribute, and what they hope to get out. This means that the meeting starts with a decentralised discussion about the purpose of the meeting, where participants sharpen their own expectations and roles through three short conversations. Even though in this method not everybody (in fact, nobody) gets to speak in front of the whole group, everybody builds or strengthens three connections with other participants and is immediately engaged, seen and heard.
Min Specs
The Min Specs method is perfect for streamlining processes but getting commitment behind each step by pruning everything down to the bare minimum. Here, participants generate “rules” for a process and then ask themselves “if this rule was broken, would we still be able to achieve the purpose?”. If the answer is yes, that rule is dismissed. So in the end, the set of rules that remains is absolutely necessary for the success of the project, which gives a lot of flexibility because other, unnecessary rules are gone, but it has also become clear to everybody why the remaining rules are essential.
For example, if you were to organise a meeting, it is essential to announce time and date, and to define a purpose for the meeting, but inviting an expert speaker, having a detailed agenda, or preparing fancy slides are optional.
There are a bunch more methods for many different purposes, which I might present as we use them in our course. In the meantime, you could browse the library for other structures (Liberating Structures), and let us know about your thoughts and experiences using them!
Lipmanowicz, H., Singhal, A., McCandless, K., & Wang, H. (2015). Liberating structures: Engaging everyone to build a good life together. Communication and” the good life”(International Communication Association Theme Book Series, Vol. 2, pp. 233-246). New York: Peter Lang.
One challenge for teachers wanting to include more sustainability in their teaching is that we haven’t yet normalized talking about sustainability in all contexts. I found the “Spiral of Silence” (see figure below) in a thesis about climate change conversations with children, but I think it is a very helpful model even when thinking about talking about sustainability in higher education classrooms, or in everyday conversations, since it shows why it is so difficult to talk about sustainability:
On the one hand, there are political and economical reasons for many people to not want to have good conversations about sustainability, so there are powerful players that benefit from, and thus artificially create, misinformation and polarisation, thus inhibiting conversations.
But also within communities, there are several factors that make conversations difficult:
Many people (even teachers) feel that they don’t know enough to have conversations about sustainability. That is very relatable, but the problem is that it is a wicked problem, meaning that there is no one right solution, so there are also no experts that have a solution. Everybody has a lack of knowledge about some aspect, and we have to get over that and still engage in conversations, but be prepared to learn from and with each other, and educate ourselves
The prevailing silence on the topic of sustainability makes it seem like it is not a topic that matters to people (because otherwise they would surely be talking about it?), but that is of course a vicious circle – if we don’t talk about it because so few other people are talking about it, what will encourage them to keep talking, or get more people engaged in the conversation?
People have doubts about who to talk to, and when. We don’t want to take hope for a good future away from children, or overburden them at a too young age. But even with students some teachers feel like “here, they should focus on learning x, and I want them to focus on that and not get caught up in despair or discussions that are beyond the scope of my course”. Because if we open up for conversations that students feel a need for but don’t have any other opportunity for, this might take on a dynamic of its own! But of course at some point, someone needs to start talking somewhere
There is also just plain emotional resistance against engaging with negative messages, and that is a powerful obstacle to conversations or engagement
Lastly, the educational system does not adequately prepare or encourage people to have these conversations. But this is where we are working for change now! 🙂
I find this Spiral of Silence so helpful because it shows how complex the problem is. It is not just that there are players who don’t want us to talk about sustainability, even within ourselves there are so many obstacles to overcome! But becoming aware of those is a good first step, and maybe reflecting on which of those (and possibly other) obstacles are relevant in our individual case. And maybe a good second step is joining our community on Teams or at an in-person event and finding other teachers willing to talk, and engage, and teach for sustainability?
—
After: Crease, A., & Singhasaneh, N. (2023). Climate Change Conversations with Children: Making Sustainability Meaningful, Tangible, and Actionable (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
In 2022, together with my peer students in the Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science program (LUMES), I designed the game “Go Fish in Vombsjön” to highlight issues related to more sustainable water usage at Lake Vombsjön in Skåne. It’s a card game primarily aimed at children from middle school or older but can just as well be played and enjoyed by adults, regardless of their level of education or knowledge.
The best thing about the game is that learning comes along with it. It doesn’t require any special knowledge or even an interest in sustainability issues to participate. Instead, the appeal lies in the enthusiasm for participating in a social game and the desire to beat one’s opponents. Hereafter, I will briefly explain the process that made the game possible, how we designed it, and finally share my insights, as well as how you could use the game “Go Fish in Vombsjön” with your friends, colleagues, or in education.
The game is played by students at a school in Staffanstorp.
Between 2021–2023, I studied the Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science master’s program at Lund University. During our second semester in the “Knowledge to Action” course, our task was to highlight a sustainability problem in our local area, document it, and clarify the process for identifying a solution to the problem.
The working group I was part of had already initiated a dialogue with the ARNA association in the UngScishop project. ARNA works to spread knowledge about sustainability challenges through ARt and NAture. Within the UngScishop project, they work with middle school students from schools around Vombsjön to teach them about sustainability related to the area. (see more from ARNA at www.arna.nu)
Our contact with ARNA made us students curious about Vombsjön, which is the water source for Lund Municipality and several other municipalities in Skåne. An intensive period of interviews with local stakeholders around Lake Vombsjön, as well as thorough research of official documents and academic sources, enabled us to identify several different aspects that all influenced the water quality in the lake.
The group collectively concluded that a game is a good method for learning about complex subjects and engaging across generational boundaries. The well-known game “Go Fish” provided the framework for the game’s structure, with the rules being largely the same. By using an existing structure, it’s easy to learn the game, and it only takes a few minutes to start an engaging and entertaining game.
The card game consists of six categories, with each category reflecting a problem that negatively affects the water in Vombsjön. Each category consists of 5 steps that reflect the different letters in the DPSIR method, plus one card that explains the story behind the problem.
The DPSIR method is a method used in sustainability studies and is mentioned in Burkhard & Müller, 2008 *, where the different letters stand for:
D – Drive, P – Pressure, S – State, I – Impact, R – Response
To make the game accessible and move away from an academic and sometimes inaccessible jargon, we chose to translate the meaning of the letters as follows:
Drive: The root cause
Pressure: What’s the problem?
State: Current situation
Impact: What does it lead to?
Response: What can you do?
Thus, we created a deck of cards with seven categories, where each category consisted of six cards (DPSIR + a story card), and all the cards together in a category formed a family. The player who collected the most families at the end of the game wins.
All six cards of the Red family
How can the game be used?
In the introduction to this post, I mentioned that the game can be used as a social game or for educational purposes. To date, the game has been played by staff at LUCSUS and students in the LUMES master’s program, as well as with around 150 middle school students in schools around Skåne.
The idea of the game is to create understanding and insight into how complex sustainability problems are interconnected but also to provide examples of how we ourselves have power over its structural problems and that sometimes we can influence the outcome by changing our everyday actions and behaviours. At the same time, it was important for the game to be engaging and entertaining. This way, we could attract and reach groups of people who would not otherwise be exposed to this type of information.
Each card in the deck tells a story. The story describes a problem, what affects the problem, and what we can ideally do about it, thereby contributing to change. By reading one of the stories at the end of each game round and then discussing it in the group, the problems are made visible and easily accessible and understandable. We, the creators of the game, hope that each round will lead to insights and hopefully provoke discussions outside the classroom. In the long run, the game can change behaviour and contribute to more sustainable water usage around Vombsjön.
On one occasion, a class from Sjöbo got to play “Go Fish in Vombsjön”. One of the teachers shared the insight that the game doesn’t need to be played in its entirety; selected parts can form the basis for discussions and assignments in the classroom and can thus be included in the regular teaching schedule. This is beneficial since time and the set curriculum can be restricting factors when trying to introduce a new topic or activity in schools.
The story of Vombsjön told in the game
Lessons learned and critique
After each time we play-tested with a group of students, we were eager to receive feedback and any criticism. Already, at the beginning of the design process, we made sure to give each card a number, and each family should be recognizable through its colour. The colour is also printed in text, so the game can accommodate the different needs of the players and misunderstandings about the colours don’t arise. (Which is an important aspect of the game). One comment we received was that each family in the deck should have a name that reflects and summarizes the problem and the described story. Depending on the age group, the amount of text on each card can be too abundant and sometimes difficult to understand and would therefore benefit from being further shortened for the younger players’ sake.
Where can I find the game?
During the course of the master’s program LUMES, a deck of cards was produced in English and one in Swedish. Over time, several decks of cards have been produced in Swedish under the name “Finns i Vombsjön”. Currently, there are about 10 decks of cards, 2 of which are now found in classrooms in Skåne. Each deck consists of 47 cards, with each card being manufactured by glueing the back and front together, cutting out each card, and laminating them by hand. This is a time-consuming process, and I hope to make the game more widely available through free downloads of PDF files, where you can make as many games as you want on your own.
Would you like to borrow a game today? Then feel free to contact me at annanohed@gmail.com.
From Left to Right: Britta Sjöstedt (Senior Lecturer, Department of Law); Karin Delin (Educational Services, Faculty of Law); Magnus Sandberg (Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine); Steven Curtis (Academic Developer, AHU); Terese Thoni (Education Coordinator, Sustainability Forum); Anders Sonesson (Head of Department, AHU); Jessika Luth Richter (Programme Director; IIIEE); Mirjam Glessmer (Academic Developer, CEE); Aysegul Sirakaya (Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law) (online)
The “Teaching for Sustainability” work (this blog, the events we run, the resources we develop, and much more) is coordinated by Terese Thoni, the education coordinator at the Lund University Sustainability Forum, together with colleagues from the Division of Higher Education Development and the Centre for Engineering Education. We organise ourselves in the following groups:
Working Group: This is the group that engages in operational planning, with meetings at least every month (currently, Terese, Steven, Karin, and Mirjam are in this group, but we welcome anyone else who wants to get engaged here!).
Task Force: Receives information and provides input that guides the work of the working group, with meetings at least once per semester. A representative (or several) from every Faculty is invited to join the Task Force (Get in touch if you would like to join!)!
On February 13th, the Task Force met for updates, feedback and general discussions. We talked about, among other topics,
We also discussed ideas for future events (for example, Mirjam is interested in organising something along the lines of “Teaching for sustainability without necessarily teaching about sustainability”), and we welcome your suggestions here!
We will very soon advertise the fall course program!
LUTL24: The Lund University Teaching and Learning conference 2024 (https://www.ahu.lu.se/en/educational-development/lutl-2024/) has the overarching theme of “connecting teachers — changing from within”, which we think fits perfectly with our idea of creating a community of teachers that are interested in sustainability. So we are preparing different contributions there!
We also discussed needs that teachers in the different faculties experience related to their efforts in teaching for sustainability. Here we also welcome your input — what can we do to make your life easier? What topics for seminars would you suggest? What resources would you hope we provide?
As always: If you would like to get in touch, we would love for you to contact us and join us in any and all of our efforts! 🙂
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. Do all courses always need to connect to sustainability? In my opinion, everything is connected to sustainability, and even if you don’t want to explicitly address it in every course and all the time, there are so many things you can do to use your teaching on any content and skills for sustainability.
One article that I find super helpful is “Structure matters: twenty-one teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity.” (Tanner, 2013). It is not about sustainability, but it is contributing to it anyway by giving super simple teaching tricks that help teachers to pay attention that all students are invited to participate and to personally connect to the topic. In a nutshell (but go read the original article, since it not only provides a checklist but also explains why each of the strategies is important and why they work):
give all students time to think (Wait more than 2 seconds after asking a question before you answer it yourself! Let them take notes and assign minute papers!) and opportunities to talk (think-pair-share!). Most important tip here that we probably all need to consider over and over again: Don’t try to do too many things! Rushing through content does not help anyone. If students don’t have time to think and talk, they are not going to be able to integrate all the new content we throw at them into their thinking anyway, so why do it in the first place?
include all students in the larger class discussions (insist on people raising their hands so not only the fastest person shouting in gets heard; make sure you don’t always pick the same person; let several students respond to the same question in their own words; …)
build an inclusive and fair classroom community for all students (learn names [or pretend to — read my favourite “name tent” article!]; use diverse examples so people can identify and get exposed to different perspectives; let them work in small groups; use different active learning methods; talk about how you want to give all students equal access to education, and how diverse perspectives and voices are important to scientific progress. And be explicit about wanting EVERYBODY to succeed!)
monitor (your own and students’) behaviour to cultivate divergent thinking rather than training them to assume that there is always only one correct answer (open-ended questions and no judging of responses or over the top praise for engagement) and establish norms (like making mistakes is a learning opportunity; we treat each other with respect)
teach all students in your classroom. Be aware that you are establishing norms not just for your classroom but also students’ assumption of how things work in your discipline from the moment they walk in, so if you focus on explaining the exams right away, the focus of the whole course is assumed to be about the assessment in the end. If you want participation, make sure everybody gets to say something very early on. If you want to make sure you are teaching everybody, don’t just give feedback to people who are coming up to talk with you, include formative feedback for everybody through multiple-choice questions, minute papers, or other methods.
Teaching for sustainability is something that needs to be integrated not only in what we teach, but in how we teach, in which behaviour we model and demand. All of the tips above are good practice in teaching anyway, but by integrating them into our teaching culture, we are also contributing a tiny little bit to teaching for sustainability, no matter what course and content we are teaching.
Tanner, K. D. (2013). Structure matters: twenty-one teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 12(3), 322-331.
I am Karin Steen, and I work at AHU (Division for Higher Education) at Lund University as a pedagogical developer. I teach university teachers in Higher Educational development and develop pedagogical resources on for example how one can teach sustainability.
I also work at LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Science) where I conduct most of my research. My PhD in Sustainability Science concerns gender and social change in subsistence farming in sub-Saharan Africa. At the moment, I am finishing up a project on ’Love in subsistence farming in sub-Saharan Africa’. I have mostly been teaching in international interdisciplinary programmes at Lund University social science faculty, such as BIDS, LUMID, LUMES, and master’s in development. I have also been director of studies.
Right now, I am especially interested in our new initiative Teaching for Sustainability, in anti-oppressive and feminist pedagogies, and in developing interdisciplinary sustainability education for postgraduates and PhD students in Southern Africa.
In my free time, I am interested in gardening, and I spend a lot of time contemplating in my hammock under the apple trees. I spend my summers at the sea on the Swedish west coast archipelago of Bohuslän.
Lydia Carling is a student in Environmental Engineering at LTH, and worked as a student with us at the Center for Engineering Education. She presented a study on student perceptions of sustainability courses at LTH’s Pedagogical Inspiration Conference 2023 (Link to the full text in Swedish here).
In her study, Lydia investigates the perspective of engineering students at LTH on their sustainability education. She explores the connection between students’ envisioned, future professional roles and their perception of sustainability work, focusing on the impact of a mandatory sustainability course on students’ views of their future careers.
Her pilot study employs an interactive interview method where students visualise their future professional roles and sort sustainability concepts they encountered in the class according to their perceived relevance to their future work. The results suggest that several factors influence students’ reasoning, including the impact of the sustainability course, knowledge from more profession-specific courses, and students’ perceptions of the industry’s approach to sustainability.
The method used in the study seemed to inspire students to explore new perspectives and connections between sustainability work and their future careers, so it might even be something to include future teaching of sustainability topics. Lydia highlights the importance of integrating sustainability education into various contexts throughout students’ academic journey to enhance their ability to address sustainability questions in their professional practices. This was topic of a lively debate at LTH’s Pedagogical Inspiration Conference, with many teachers showing great interests in her method, results, and interpretations, and agreeing with Lydia’s suggestions for new approaches to integrating sustainability in the curricula.
Hi there! My name is Terese Thoni and I work as education coordinator at Lund University Sustainability Forum. The Sustainability Forum is Lund University’s umbrella organisation for strategic support and coordination for sustainability issues. We have in the past years intensified our focus on education for sustainability and to find new and interesting resources for our teachers. I support the integration of sustainability aspects in study programmes at all levels and the development of new educational initiatives focused on sustainability, collaborate with external partners, arrange events, and support networking activities. To more easily coordinate efforts in the area of education for sustainability across the whole university and all faculties, the initiative Teaching for Sustainability was created in Spring 2023, coordinated by the Sustainability Forum in collaboration with the Division for Higher Education Development and the Centre for Engineering Education (CEE) at Lund University’s Faculty of Engineering.
I have a background in research and teaching in the fields of environmental science and political science. My research interests include international climate politics and the net-zero targets, Carbon Dioxide Removal-technologies, Ecosystem-based Adaptation, and ecological compensation.
I have been interested in sustainability for as long as I can remember. My elementary school teacher often talked about deforestation, and it saddened me to think about the many animals losing their homes. I decided at an early age to work with nature protection in one way or another. I engaged in all kinds of small-scale projects as a child, from building homes for insects, to collecting trash, to taking an interest in what we eat and how this affects the environment. At the age of 8, I decided to build a compost at home in our kitchen in our small apartment in Stockholm – a decision that led to a minor bug invasion, which I found very exciting. With time, I have tried to focus less on individual change (even though I try my best to live as I learn) and more on change at a group level. I see the integration of sustainability competences in education as fundamental to our ability to address our large sustainability crises. I look forward to engaging with teachers and students and to hearing how we can best support efforts to this end.
“Teaching sustainability” is a course that aims at providing teachers who want to develop their teaching on sustainability with the opportunity to discuss and collaborate with peers on the topic, and to document their shared reasoning. This could include developing whole courses, course modules or ways to include aspects of sustainability in any course. The course addresses several global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace, and justice.
During this course, we will have the opportunity to
read and hear about relevant and helpful literature
carry out a group project on an issue chosen based on personal relevance (e.g., a lesson plan, teaching material, list of sustainability aspects to be included in a given course)
present and get feedback from other teachers at a presentation to other LU teachers at the course’s last meeting.
The course corresponds to 2 weeks full-time work. Note that you need to put in more work than just the scheduled meetings:
Wed 13/3 13:15 -16:00
Tue 9/4 13:15 -16:00
Tue 7/5 13:15 -16:00
Tue 4/6 13:15 -16:00
For a pass on the course, participants must have attended the initial meeting and 75% of the scheduled activities, and also passed the project report.
The course will be facilitated in English.
Audience
This event is intended for teachers at LTH, especially those who have experience in using serious games in teaching sustainability, or are considering it. But anyone interested in joining is welcome to do so! For participants from outside of LTH, standard rates apply.
Registration
Space is limited to 15 participants. Registration is open until 20.2.2024.
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