Teaching for Sustainability

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“Addressing students’ eco-anxiety when teaching sustainability in higher education”, inspired by Eriksson et al. (2022)

It is extremely common that we experience strong emotions around climate change and all the other crises in the world (see our earlier blogposts on climate emotions and the typical process from being unaware, through shock, to coping with climate anxiety).

Some or all of these emotions are likely to come up for out students, too — because of topics in the courses we teach, or because they are informed citizens, in our classes or outside. Below I share a summary of Eriksson et al. (2022), who write about “Addressing students’ eco-anxiety when teaching sustainability in higher education“. In the paper, Eriksson et al. (2022) analyse their own teaching in computer sciences for how climate anxiety is communicated by students and teachers, what support students receive, and come up with a lost of eight suggestions for how educators can work with students’ eco anxiety. I am summarising their list below with my own thoughts added (see also featured image for my fancy(-ish) overview).

Before we start: I am presenting it a bit as a timeline where we start on the left and then work our way towards the right, but of course it is not that simple. Sometimes we have to go back to earlier steps, or sometimes we might skip one or two ahead… And I think the first one will have to be ongoing work forever. That said, here we go!

1. Self-reflection and inner work by the teacher

Eriksson et al. (2022) explain this point saying “In order to be able to support and hold a safe space for the students, the educators need to develop their personal emotional resilience” and describe that this is happening during course development in their case. But what does that mean in practice for other people who might want to do that?

That is, of course, highly individual. I have had drafts of this post — with lots of empty space at this point — for months, because I felt like it would be good to give actionable advice here. But then at some point I realised that the process is the point (yes, I need to keep reminding myself of that), so you’ll just get what I can write right now, and hopefully I can update this at some point in the future! So for me, the “self-reflection and inner work” means going through all the steps below myself — becoming aware of eco-emotions and how common they are, learning about how to cope with them, finding spaces to discuss them, finding ways to ground myself, becoming active in a community, and trying to do their step 8: “Maintaining balance, remembering joy and upholding meaningfulness“. As part of upholding meaningfulness, it meant committing to doing things that not everybody will be happy with all the time (like Webb (2013) nicely writes: “A pedagogy of transformative hope will never hide behind a veil of neutrality and as a consequence will always generate criticism and opposition“).

I am also reading a lot to support this process. The most important book for me has been Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” (see summaries here). We read it in our slow reading book club, and many of the lessons have become an integral part in how we talk about our work with my closest colleagues. Also really important, and I am not done thinking, is Servant-Miklos (2024)’s “Pedagogies of collapse. A hopeful education for the end of the world as we know it”. And right now I am some 40 pages into Kahane (2025)’s “Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems: The Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement”, and I am thinking that this would be great as the next book for the slow reading club after summer! Do you have anything else you would recommend?

But assuming we are doing the best we can here and that it just takes time, there are more steps:

2. Validating students’ ecological emotions and experiences of eco-anxiety

Eriksson et al. (2022) write that “[t]he educators should […] acknowledge the existence of eco-anxiety since this can alleviate ethical and power issues […]“, but don’t really explain how that would work, and I am also not really sure what that means other than sounding good. But what I think should happen in this step is to describe the kind of emotions people commonly experience and show the prevalence of eco-anxiety (see for example my blogpost on Marlis’ presentation about eco-emotions for some numbers). It could also be an idea do to an (anonymous!!) survey in the classroom so students can see that they are not alone with their emotions, even though they might not have talked about eco-emotions with that specific group of peers. Menti might be a good tool for this, or Microsoft Reflect also has built-in check-ins with feeling monsters!

3. Admitting to feeling difficult emotions ourselves

Of course, we cannot just require of students to share that they experience emotions, but we need to model sharing difficult feelings in order to encourage students to do the same. Here, Eriksson et al. (2022) share a really good idea: They use an “Ask Me Anything”-type teacher panel where teachers are prepared to answer questions (including personal ones) in their function as role models. Questions were submitted through Menti (including “Are you vegan and if not why not?” and on personal experiences dealing with climate anxiety),  and the event was moderated by a PhD student. They perceived an “undertone of frustration or perhaps even anger” from students, which they say could possibly be due to the perceived unfairness that the teacher generation had opportunities, like flying, that the younger generation does not have to the same extent any more. That is a really helpful reminder that if we try something similar, we should emotionally prepare for that type of reactions…

4. Information about coping with eco-anxiety

I think it is important to stress that teachers cannot act as therapists and shouldn’t try to, either. But they should encourage students to seek professional help if they feel that they might benefit from it (and definitely if students experience grave cases of climate anxiety!), and they can definitely share some techniques for how to deal with eco-anxiety both during the course and later on. Learning from a course, in the sense that it is transforming thinking, might not happen during the course but possibly afterwards. Eriksson et al. (2022) describe a student reporting that the message of the course only sank in after the course had ended, when the student was back in their home country with family. Their family had a different background, questioned what the student had learnt, and wasn’t able to emotionally support the sudden eco-anxiety. I would guess that this is something that many families would struggle with, and it also illustrates why it is so difficult to talk about eco anxiety with people who are (or who we suspect might) not be in the same space themselves, and why we need to give our students tools to deal with their own (and possibly even others’) eco-anxiety.

Helpful tools here might be

  • the spiral of silence to explain why it is so difficult to talk about sustainability
  • the process of eco-anxiety to explain the typical sequence from blissful ignorance to rude awakening to climate anxiety to finding ways to cope with it, and talk about how the steps and the coping can be supported

There are also really good resources (unfortunately only in Swedish) by Klimatpsykologerna, for example audio files to guide through eco emotions to understand what they want to tell us, but also workshop templates and much more!

I think it is important that we are explicit about the tools we are using and not “just” apply them, so students know they have them available and can use them when they need them, even if that is only long after the course is over.

5. Opportunities to discuss emotions

We should not rely on students having conversations about emotions outside of class, whether with their peers or families or other people. Instead, if we want to normalise conversations on eco-anxiety, we need to create opportunities and build relationships and peer support.

Eriksson et al. (2022) suggest creating safe spaces. In the graphic above, I annotated it with an asterisk, but here is the longer version of what that is supposed to indicate: While it is a nice ideal, it is impossible to create safe spaces, and we should instead aim for accountable ones. But in any case, we should establish and enforce clear rules of what is acceptable and what is not. And both the rules and enforcement can of course be co-created, but they need to be clear and enforced nevertheless.

Then, we can use pre-planned exercises on discussing emotions (for example using check-ins on Menti or Microsoft Reflect, the blob tree with the Climate Fresk, …) or just inviting students to reflect on their wellbeing at the start of a seminar. On Pihkala’s blog, he suggests reflection questions to work with his process of eco-emotions framework, for example “Where is the line between healthy self-care and problematic distancing, and how is this shaped by the various circumstances in which people live?“. But it is important to neither try to elicit certain emotions, nor force people to verbalise something they aren’t willing to talk about.

One great suggestion by Eriksson et al. (2022) are “discussion seminars”, where each students submits a question to discuss (they write “It should be noted that, in our experience, student-generated questions can be considerably more critical, pointed and provocative than questions we as teachers would dare to pose to a class!“), the teacher edits it down to a list that fits one paper, and then everybody sits in a circle and after a check-in, there is a pair-share discussion of the questions. This seminar is not explicitly about emotions, but when they come up, they are given the space they need. Students are reported to say that they feel they have the room to discuss “their own” questions in those seminars, so it doesn’t just feel like a chore or busy-work.

Another good idea is to make ourselves available to discuss emotions, but of course within reason — teachers are typically not qualified to be therapists, and even if some are, since there is a power dynamic, this is something to be careful with. Eriksson et al. (2022) write they regularly visit a student pub to be available to anyone who wants to have a chat.

Lastly, we can also suggest opportunities for discussions of emotions outside of the course, for example student groups working with sustainability topics.

6. Opportunities for embodied activities

Learning is not just about the brain and we should try to engage the whole person. One recommendation for group work with the climate anxiety process suggested on Pihkala’s blog is to have the process laid out on the floor, to move physically through it, and to reflect on experiences with the different stages. I think this is a really good idea!

Other possible embodied activities are of course also outdoor activities (active lunch break, anyone?) or anything that is exploring the world with our senses and not just sitting still, thinking. Eriksson et al. (2022) describe “forcing” the students to go for an indoor or outdoor walk in pairs to talk about questions they had chosen before (from a list of questions; they used those questions to listen to a guest speaker in a focussed way to answer that specific question. Nice idea!)

7. Collective action

This is about empowering students and giving them a way to not just improve their emotional wellbeing but also the world. Eriksson et al. (2022) write that “while educators might not be able to directly engage students in activism, they can inform students of various ways to engage and work with climate and environmental issues“. Collective action does not necessarily even mean activism (there are lots of ways for nonviolent ways of protest and persuasion!), it can also mean doing something else constructive and meaningful in community, on or off campus, maybe even as part of a course (for example a service-learning project).

8. Maintaining balance, remembering joy and upholding meaningfulness

Here, Eriksson et al. (2022) suggest a more up-beat last lecture to leave students with positive memories, but I find that a bit problematic. I want students to have constructive, not false, hope, so what I think needs to be done here in order to not burn out is to find a balance in the “living with the crisis” part of climate anxiety: combine positive action with emotional engagement (incl. grieving) and self-care (incl. distancing — and of course: dipping and wave watching!). And find ways to integrate playful exploration or other activities that bring joy and connect us to meaning in life.

I tried to find Klimatpsykologerna’s “ice cream image” to show the ingredients to move forward: three scoops of ice cream, “take breaks”, “act together”, “cope with emotions”, which rest embedded in a cup of “social support and community”. Guess not finding that image and having to re-create it myself is as good an excuse as any to go find some ice cream for joy?

These are the 8 steps as suggested by Eriksson et al., 2022. And I do find them quite helpful as a first approach and overview over to how to address students’ eco-anxiety!

Eriksson, E., Peters, A. K., Pargman, D., Hedin, B., Laurell-Thorslund, M., & Sjöö, S. (2022, June). Addressing students’ eco-anxiety when teaching sustainability in higher education. In 2022 International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) (pp. 88-98). IEEE.

Pihkala P. The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief: A Narrative Review and a New Proposal. Sustainability. 2022; 14(24):16628. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416628

Webb, D. (2013). Pedagogies of hope. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32, 397-414.

26/08/2025

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Pihkala (2022) model for the process of eco-anxiety

Following up on the recent post about eco-emotions, the model by Pihkala (2022) can be helpful when thinking and talking about eco-anxiety.

There are three main phases that are run through one after the other: Before awareness of the problem, then a strong anxiety and deep depression phase of coping and changing, and lastly living with the crisis.

Before. This phase consists of several steps. After the bliss of “unknowing”, of not being aware of the problem, which I visualise with a crib, comes a phase of semi-consciousness where people are aware that there is something but try to ignore it (like that alarm clock we try to ignore or snooze — this cognitive dissonance can be really unhealthy), but at some point we do wake up and then the enormity of the crisis hits us like a tsunami.

Strong anxiety and depression; coping and changing. Here, three modes co-exist: action (taking constructive action like joining demonstrations in order to swim and not sink), grieving (which can include also other emotions, like anger to not being able to experience a lifestyle like the parent generation did, and dealing with them for example in discussion groups) and distancing (which can be positive self-care like taking a day off from news, or negative avoidance like never looking at news to be able to live in denial — putting the head in the sand (or, in my picture, diving deep down)).

Through a process of adjustment and transformation, we lastly reach a stage where we can live with the crisis, and while there is a potential for anxiety and depression. The three modes here are similar to the ones in the previous phase, except that now they are conscious more explicitly managed by, for example, making sure that there is some engagement with emotions, and that self-care is constructive.

On their blog, Pihkala suggests a couple of reflection questions when using the model, e.g.  “Where is the line between healthy self-care and problematic distancing, and how is this shaped by the various circumstances in which people live?“. This is a very interesting discussion that also came up in Marlis’ presentation about eco-emotions in relation to mindfulness. Pihkala also suggests a group activity where the different phases are laid out on the floor and participants move from phase to phase and reflect on their experiences and emotions with that phase.

I think this model can be very helpful when talking with students, acknowledging that eco-anxiety is very common (in her presentation, Marlis gave us some numbers…), and suggesting that there is a typical sequence of types of experiences and actions. It also helps to motivate any activities we might want to offer to deal with eco-anxiety — since it is such a common phenomenon, there is actually some experience on what can help with the “process of adjustment and transformation”, and there are also many suggestion for how to constructively deal with the three modes in the “living with the crisis” stage.

Pihkala P. The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief: A Narrative Review and a New Proposal. Sustainability. 2022; 14(24):16628. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416628

18/08/2025

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Summary of Marlis Wullenkord’s presentation on eco-emotions

Back in April, the the Environmental Politics Research Group (EPRG) at Lund University and the Research Group on Green Politics (REGROUP) at the University of Copenhagen co-organised a workshop on “How to deal with climate anxiety as teachers and researchers?”. As part of that, Marlis Wullenkord, Associate Senior Lecturer in Environmental Psychology, gave a presentation on eco emotions, which I will try and summarise below.

Emotions in general consist of a subjective experience, and can be expressed both in behaviour and in physiological responses. They serve to direct our attention and orient perception, and — given some degree of emotional literacy to put words to and make sense of what we are feeling — provide us with information about both our inner and the outer world. Contradictory emotions can co-exist, and there are many different strategies to cope with emotions.

Eco-anxiety includes emotions like anger, shame, grief, guilt, sadness, powerlessness, worry, and others. While some see it as a pathological condition that needs treatment, others see is as reasonable response to an existential threat. But in any case, eco-anxiety is very common:

  • Worldwide, 80% of young people report feeling at least moderately worried about climate change. This is highest for women, indigenous populations, people from the global south. 45% of young people worldwide report that the worries have impact on functioning, for example causing trouble sleeping or dealing with social situations.
  • For Swedish high school students,  worry levels significantly increased from 2010 to 2020. Worries are highest when thinking about future generations, animals and nature, and people in poor countries, and not as high relating to oneself or friends and family. But preliminary data from this year and last year indicates that the worry levels might now be back to values comparable to 2010, but it is unclear why that is the case.
  • For German adults, a study investigated climate anxiety in terms of thoughts and emotions, and impairment. While there are people that score high or low on all, for part of the population there is a disconnect where they score high on thoughts and emotions, but low on impairment, so that would be an interesting population to investigate coping strategies! Generally, younger people tend to be more anxious (more impacted in the long run combined with less influence over their future because of roles and representation, and “more vulnerable to social construction to silence” — see also my interpretation of the Spiral of Silence, I believe that is a very real problem!), and women are more likely to be anxious. But interestingly, the most impaired group tends to be male (possibly because expressing emotions and coping with emotions is very gendered — men generally have less access to validating contexts for support?)! But the study also finds that the most impaired are at the same time the most connected with nature, so “connecting with nature” does not seem to work as a coping strategy.

Coping efforts and strategies to manage stressful experiences can be focussed on coping with the actual emotion, on dealing with the problem that is causing the emotion, or with finding meaning behind the emotions. A different study investigated the influence of mindfulness and integrative emotion regulation. They found that awareness and accepting of emotions are buffers that can keep anxiety from turning into an impairment, but they found no relation to activism (e.g. signing a partition, occupying an airport; the study didn’t look at private sphere actions how participants’ own behaviour influences carbon footprint etc). On the other hand, integration of emotion (I feel anxious, I am aware of it) into the sense of self (what does it mean about me, about the world, what can I do with that?) makes people more likely to lead activism, but there is no relation with impairment.

One result from many studies was that talking about uncomfortable emotions is really important. In a study from Sweden, 75% of respondents report talking about climate change more than once a month, 40% once a week or more. In that same study, 1/3rd of the participants reports talking about their emotions in at least half of their conversations, 1/4 almost never. But talking is related to more anxiety and more emotions, and that to more pro-environmental actions. And interestingly, experiencing empathy when talking about climate anxiety enables pro-environmental action further. So, as Marlis suggests, empathy training might be a possible intervention method. In any case, emotional literacy, being able to name your emotions, seems to help with mental health. So we should encourage emotional expression and meet them in others with empathy!

What is really not helping, though, is distancing oneself from climate anxiety, for example because of wanting to be objective and look at facts (like many teachers still teach — and, concerningly, this one correlates with weaker tendencies for collective action and policy support!), or because expressing anxiety is discouraged (again, as many teachers still teach), or because people avoid thinking about climate in everyday life. The latter two are actually correlated with higher impairment!

But there is also positive distancing: taking breaks, slowing down with purpose. Marlis shared Klimatpsykologerna’s “ice cream image” for how to cope with climate anxiety: three scoops of ice cream, “take breaks”, “act together”, “cope with emotions” rest embedded in a cup of “social support and community”.

So where do we go from here?

Emotional awareness is critical, and Marlis recommends to integrate emotional literacy tools in teacher training (btw, klimatpsykologerna also have a cool method data base [in Swedish]), give teachers time and resources, and to create space for institutional discussions and policies on how to confront climate anxiety. She says that “anxiety is often about inactivity of powerful actors” (my emphasis, because that resonated with me so much). Powerful institutions, like universities, should acknowledge their responsibility, act in responsible ways, and in that way help fight the problem directly, while also reduce anxiety by showing that they are taking the problem seriously and are doing something about it. And — side note — this signal is not only important for people that struggle with climate anxiety — there is also the other end of the spectrum where the paradigm that universities are institutions of rationality keeps them from taking the problem seriously themselves (because if it was really such a big deal, wouldn’t there be rules in place that I need to learn about it and include it in my teaching, since as a rational place, universities are probably as close to perfect as it gets?). So even more important that universities take action!

Marlis also shared some advice for teachers: Work to increase your own, and your students’, emotional literacy. What are emotions for? What can they tell us? How can we work with them? And she shared that in a study, even 8-year-olds say that they would rather be told the truth than white lies. So put trust in your students, be truthful about “the facts” but also about how they personally affect you. Leaving things out, or making them sound less scary, is not the way forward!

Lastly, Terese shared a piece of advice that our colleague Steven Curtis (who we miss a lot!) has taught us for dealing with climate anxiety: give space for and validate the emotions, embody them (for example through art), and then encourage action!

11/08/2025

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A “Teaching for Sustainability” Bingo

Ideally, we would approach Teaching for Sustainability holistically, but sometimes small pockets of time are all we get. This Bingo might help you look at your teaching from slightly different perspectives, and over time, small tweaks done with a “plus one” approach can also build up to substantial changes.

We have developed the Bingo card as a playful approach to thinking about Teaching for Sustainability. Maybe the prompts remind you of an idea that you once had but that somehow never got implemented, or they inspire you to dig a little and find inspiration from colleagues or the literature, or to come up with something new. Or maybe you get sidetracked and work on doing something completely different that benefits your teaching. Any way the Bingo card contributes to thoughts about teaching is a good way!

We would love to hear from you: Do you have suggestions for prompts we should add? Any other comments?

P.S.: Here are my instructions for how to develop a Bingo to use in your own teaching!

06/08/2025

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Is concern about sustainability a good reason not to use Generative AI? A guest post by Rachel Forsyth

It’s part of my job as an educational developer at Lund University to talk about Generative AI (GenAI) tools and their place in education. The university provides a couple of GenAI tools for all staff and students, and we need to explain what they do and what impact they may have on teaching, learning, and examination (assessment). Something I hear often from colleagues is that “We shouldn’t use GenAI because it is an environmental disaster.”   

I think there are plenty of things to consider when deciding whether or not to use GenAI tools: accuracy, fairness, bias, integrity, security, data privacy, and of course the environmental impact is another very important factor. But I don’t hear that statement in relation to the use of other digital tools. Are GenAI tools a lot worse? I have tried to find out, but it isn’t easy for someone who is not a specialist in sustainability or environmental impacts.  

GAI tools (and all other AI tools) are trained by comparing vast quantities of data (non-technical explanation, but I think it is sufficient for this purpose!). This needs a lot of computing power, which in turn means a lot of cooling of computer equipment, which uses a lot of water (Ekin, 2019), as well as increased environmental impact from the manufacture and disposal of the computers themselves. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has recommended a set of approaches to measure and monitor the costs of AI (OECD, 2022), to help governments with policy-making. That could be useful in the longer term to provide a basis for data for non-specialist people like me, but I can’t use that kind of tool myself.  

Bashir et al (2024) make a really good case for systematic and targeted development of GenAI so that the selected areas for further work are worthwhile, and not just novel. Unfortunately, research in this area is mostly funded by for-profit organisations, so voices asking for selective development may not be heard very strongly. Commercial organisations are also reticent about sharing relevant data about the energy and water use of their GenAI systems, and this lack of transparency makes it difficult to calculate the environmental impact of both training the models and making individual requests. And whilst we know that the training part uses a lot of computing power, we don’t know much about general use of these tools to generate outputs to regular queries. 

During 2025, we have started to get some estimates of impact, based on informed guesses by researchers. Jon Ippolito (2025) has made a set of nine “guesses based on incomplete and often contradictory sources.” which tries to compare GenAI use with other common applications. In decreasing energy use order, he offers these comparisons, which include the energy use in Wh (Watt hours) and water use in litres:  

Energy use Water use Type of activity 
1000 Wh    4 L hour-long Zoom call with 10 people 
200 Wh  .8 L  hour-long video streamed on a big TV 
30 Wh  120 cc  generating a page with an online chatbot 
20 Wh  80 cc  charging a smartphone 
6 Wh  24 cc  generating an image online 
3 Wh  12 cc  generating a sentence with an online chatbot 
.3 Wh  1 cc  one non-AI Google search 
.01 Wh  .04 cc Generating text with a local chatbot [installed on your local computer] 

(table redrawn from the article) 

Fairly similar estimates are made in a MIT Technology Review article by James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart (2025). They also complain about the lack of transparency from companies and suggest that low-scale use is not more troublesome than other things that we may do online, but that the widespread incorporation of AI in everyday software may have a significant multiplier effect. MIT Technology Review has a whole series of articles on AI and energy use, if you are interested in following this up further.  

I think the main thing I take away from this is that we aren’t curious enough about our everyday use of digital tools. I think I knew, vaguely, that streaming videos and online meetings are quite heavy users of computer processing power, and thus have an environmental impact, but I didn’t realise how much it was compared to standard internet searches or even GenAI use. I had definitely read in a newspaper somewhere that creating images with GenAI is very resource-intensive, but it doesn’t seem worse than generating large amounts of text, from these figures.  

There are plenty of reasons to be cautious about GenAI tools, and we should apply that thinking to all our decisions as users and consumers of digital tools and information.  

Note: This is an edited version of some material in our free Canvas course for teachers at Lund University. No GenAI tools were used in writing this post, but I don’t know how much energy my normal Office installation uses.

Author: Rachel Forsyth, Educational developer, Unit for Educational Services, Lund University

Featured image: “Professors see no evil”, generated by Copilot, May 2024

References 

Bashir, N., Donti, P., Cuff, J., Sroka, S., Ilic, M., Sze, V., Delimitrou, C., & Olivetti, E. (2024). The Climate and Sustainability Implications of Generative AI.  

Ekin, A. (2019). AI can help us fight climate change. But it has an energy problem, too. Horizon: The EU Research and Innovation Magazine.  

Ippolito, J. (2025). AI’s impact on energy and water usage v 1.8. University of Maine. Retrieved 07/07/25 from https://ai-impact-risk.com/ai_energy_water_impact.html 

O’Donnell, J., & Crownhart, C. (2025). We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. MIT Technology Review.  

OECD. (2022). Measuring the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence compute and applications. OECD. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/content/paper/7babf571-en 

 

04/08/2025

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The process is the point — reflections about our Teaching for Sustainability book club

During the spring, a handful of people interested in Teaching for Sustainability met to discuss the book “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” by Venet (2024). We intentionally set out to do a slow reading of the book — reading the three parts over three months to discuss in one meeting each — to give us the time to read and think, not least about the implications of what we read on our own work.

About the book

First off: This is not a book about teaching for sustainability, yet it is the book that we needed to teach for sustainability. While in some parts very clearly written in a US context and for schools rather than universities and thus not directly applicable to our context, we loved so many of the insights shared there. One of the main messages, “the process is the point” — see also the title of this post, really resonated and has stuck with us. It matters how we do change, and how we approach the change process needs to be a reflection the desired outcomes already. It is so easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of all the work that there is to do for us (in the book with a focus on justice and healing, for us with one on sustainability, but maybe those are one and the same?), and the book carefully explains that we need to move with urgency while also moving slowly and carefully — sustainable — enough to not unintentionally break something along the way, neither around us nor within us. It also really highlights the importance of connecting with people that are unlike us, and working with them rather than for them (or against them) to fix the system. I wrote summaries of the three parts in preparation for the three meetings in case you want to get a quick look (Part 1, part 2, and part 3). But I really recommend reading the real thing, it is an empowering read with lots of deep thoughts and at the same time many practical tips!

About the conversations

I (Mirjam) initially suggested the book because I had started reading it and felt that my work with Steven and Terese on this, our initiative Teaching for Sustainability, would really benefit from many of the insights. I was initially thinking about practical things, like “harbour days”, i.e. days where we all gather to share resources and know-how to work on shared projects together or help each other out with individual tasks. But it quickly became clear that the book gave us a shared language for things that were difficult if not impossible to express before, and helped us shape our work not just on a practical level, but also more generally in how we approach it and the many conflicts that are inherent in what we are trying to do within a system that existed long before us.

About the future

We are planning more book clubs after the summer (starting of with a poetry lunch!). More information on this very soon, and if you have any suggestions we would love to hear from you!

29/07/2025

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Some practical examples from a grassroot initiative for teaching circularity and sustainability

Funded by LTH through the Green Transition initiative, Jonas Niklewski and Ivar Björnsson organized a course on “Teaching Sustainability for a Circular Built Environment”, which brought together 10 teachers from the Circular Building Sector profile area and educational developer Mirjam Glessmer. Over the last half year, the group met regularly and together worked on projects that will contribute at least eight courses in the LTH V-program directly – and hopefully many more indirectly.

Yesterday, at the course’s last meeting, many different, very practical, projects were presented, among others:

Changed criteria for what makes the best bridge model in the course VSMF05 Engineering Modelling: Analysis of Structures. While previously the goal of a practical bridge-building contest was to create a bridge that can hold the highest load, this year there was the additional requirement to do this using as little new material as possible! Student teams could “check out” timber building material (and return anything that wasn’t used), resulting in bridges that used approximately half of the materials as was used on average 2022-2024, while maintaining a similar failure load. Also, due to this new requirement while re-using old materials wasn’t limited, bridge designs became a lot more diverse and inventive than in previous years. This is a very interesting case to reflect on how external requirements shape design!
A study on how students are taught and introduced to the concept of Life-Cycle Analysis in the V-programme was carried out to know what can be assumed as prior knowledge and skills and built on in two courses in year 4 and 5 (VBEF50 CAD and BIM Applications in Construction & VBKN30 Timber Structures). This is based on questionnaires and interviews with teachers, which themselves resulted in many good conversations that already influenced another teacher to shape the framing in their course so it is easier for students to connect the content with other instruction later, and now will serve as a basis for what is taught in VBEF50 and VBKN30.
A closer cooperation between two different courses on concrete (VBKN05 Concrete Structures & VBMN10 Concrete in a Life-cycle Perspective), where mixtures with different climate footprints are developed and produced in one course (with the aim of testing beams cast using these mixture), and then those samples are assessed again in a later course (where focus is on assessing the materials durability and long-term performance).
Benchmarking: In a course which already contained multiple sustainability aspects (VBFN01 Sustainable Building Technology) benchmarking was done against a European best practice list of criteria for sustainable housing, and considerations on how circularity aspects can be highlighted further.
A roleplay in the course VBKF15 – Structural Engineering that will be run in May with the goal of engaging students in reflecting on and critically discussing the significant sustainability impacts that decisions taken by structural engineers and other built environment industry actors. The role plays focus on actual case studies and are intended to broaden student perspectives and highlight their role as sustainability leaders in their future careers.

Additionally, there were many ideas for how to continue working with sustainability and circularity in the whole V programme – for example with a portfolio that students add to throughout their studies.

The benefit to other courses will also come through the upcoming publication of project reports and their presentation at LTH’s Pedagogical Inspiration Conference (where we will also present more overarching take-aways from this course), as well as through the increased conversations between teachers.

Many of the course participants mentioned that they appreciated having a scheduled course to provide the space to talk about their teaching, being “forced” to read and discuss literature on teaching and learning, and how they enjoyed working collaboratively on improving their teaching. Now, after the end of this course, more teaching fikas are already in the planning – this time including also other interested colleagues!

Please let us know if you would like to be kept in the loop about presentations resulting from this project, and you are also very welcome to contact us if you would like to have a chat about what we learned and how that might be relevant for your teaching, or how you can make a course like this happen for you and your own colleagues*!

*another option is to join the next course on Teaching for Sustainability that will run at the Centre for Engineering Education this fall

26/04/2025

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Sign up now: LTH’s course on “Teaching for Sustainability” Fall 2025

“Teaching for Sustainability” is a course run at the Centre for Engineering Education at LTH. The goal is to provide 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 other ways to include aspects of sustainability in any course.

The main component of the course is a project carried out in a small group, addressing a teaching issue of relevance to the participants. The project is reported orally and in writing during the course and is to be of a quality that makes it suitable for reading by other teaching staff at Lund University. In addition to the project, the course consists of scheduled seminars intended to support the work on the report. Literature studies of relevance to the project are also included.

The course corresponds to 2 weeks full-time work, most of which happens self-organised outside of the scheduled course meetings below:

  • 1 September 9:00 -16:00
  • 2 September 9:00 -16:00
  • 16 September 9:00 -16:00
  • 4 December – Presentation at LTH Pedagogical Inspiration Conference, time slots will be set by conference committee later

This round of the course will be co-taught by me (Mirjam Glessmer) and Robert Kordts, with a cohort of participants at the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway. I have taught this course for the last 3 years and have shared many thoughts about the course itself and related reading on my personal blog. I have also just run an interview study with teachers at LTH about how they have implemented sustainability aspects in their teaching and what challenges they have overcome or are still facing. So I am hoping that this course will be useful both in terms of the theoretical foundation as well as the context-specific practicalities!

With Robert Kordts, we gain an excellent and inspiring co-teacher with a lot of experience in both educational development and climate activism, and with the UiB participants, we are bringing in an international perspective and opportunities for cross-Nordics cooperations. To make this setup work smoothly, we are doing most of the course meetings online, except for some additional meetings at agreed-upon dates and times if wished, and the last meeting, where you will present your projects in person in a special session at the LTH Pedagogical Inspiration Conference.

Look at blogposts about previous rounds of this course here and register for fall 2025 here! You are also welcome to contact me for any questions you might have.

23/04/2025

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The most important question to ask our students: What will you do with your freedom?

Educational researcher Gert Biesta discusses the purpose of education on the podcast Talking Teaching (youtube video embedded below).

In the episode, Biesta explains the three purposes of education: qualification (equipping students to function in the workforce and society; so understanding, skills, capabilities), socialisation (providing students with a sense of orientation in the world, and teaching cultural practices and traditions), and subjectification (encouraging students to be the subjects of their own lives, not objects of all the other players and forces; becoming autonomous and independent in thinking and acting).

These three purposes are not necessarily aligned with each other. Biesta uses an image to explain how the three play together: they are like three boards in a setup of 3D chess, where a move on one board also influence the games on the others. He gives an example from teaching history: if we focus on memorizing and reproducing facts (qualification), that implies that that is what we value and that that is our understanding of history (socialisation), and how we see the students’ role in the world — in this case to not engage with history and build a relationship with it (subjectification).

If we forget the subjectification role of education, if we don’t ask our students “what will you do with your freedom?”, it does not matter how well we do on the two other fronts. Biesta’s example is Nazi Germany: “they were brilliant at socialization. They were rather good at qualification, but they paid no attention to subjectification. And then you have systems that perform really highly, but if they forget to take care of the soul of the person, they become utterly dangerous.”

So, what will we do with our freedom? What will we use our academic freedom for? What will we teach our students?

 

 

04/04/2025

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Join the course “Poetry, Sustainability, and Change”!

This coming September Barbara Barrow and myself (Ellen Turner) will be teaching the 3-credit interdisciplinary course, Poetry, Sustainability, and Change. This course is one of the university’s so-called X-courses which are aimed at students who are already studying but wish to add a little extra to their main studies (in fact, anyone who meets the general entry and English requirements can apply). In our course, we want to move both the analytic and creative approaches to studies of poetry out of the confines English literature classroom, to those who are concerned various sustainability issues and who might not other encounter or know how to grapple with poetry.

Barbara and myself are both associate professors here at the English Unit at the Centre of Languages and Literature at Lund University. Our underlying ethos is that we, as instructors, bring the tools for analyzing and creating poetry, and the participants bring with them the themes they are interested in, along with their discipline-specific content knowledge about sustainability.  We designed our course, which consists of three workshops over the course of a month, with the idea of providing an entry into how the poetry might help participants make sense of some of the topics of sustainability that they might be exploring on personal, academic, or professional levels.

Inspired by Didham (2022), who highlights poetry’s potential to reframe dominant economic narratives of growth and exploitation,[1] we aim to harness poetry’s emotional impact to transform readers into “active agents of change” in the field of sustainability. Building on Illingworth and Jack’s (2024) advocacy for using poetry across disciplines in higher education,[2] this course extends poetry’s transformative potential beyond the literature classroom, encouraging participants to “see” differently. In particular, we invite readers to decenter human perspectives through poems, thinking about the world through the eyes of snails and jellyfish, for example, or through the protestations of an overworked piece of land.

Acknowledging the fact that many of our participants will be encountering poetry in an academic context for the first time, we approach poetry from the basics with as little jargon as possible. In the first workshop, participants will be introduced to accessible tools for analyzing poetry and they will begin to see how they can apply these tools to poems on sustainability topics of their choice. For instance, someone interested in biodiversity might explore poems about bees to see how poetic perspectives enhance understanding of ecological themes. The second workshop will focus on how poetry engages emotions, encouraging both individual and collaborative responses. Here dialogue is crucial as we explore how reading as a community of readers can inform the creation of meaning and reshape perceptions of sustainability issues and challenges.

We are excited also to trial a creative component in the final workshop of the course. Lead primarily by Barbara, who is herself a novelist and short fiction writer, we have piloted scaffolded creative writing exercises on others courses that we have co-taught and often students remark in course evaluations that this was their favourite part of the course. While some students have dabbled in poetry writing before, for many this is their first attempt at writing poetry, so we want to stress that this exercise is low-stakes and we aim to create a supportive and non-judgemental environment for this to take place in. Prospective students might also be relieved to hear that we won’t be assessing their actual poetry output, but are rather concerned with the reflection that goes on around the process. How has poetry-writing helped participants to explore their sustainability themes that matter to them? The goal is that this creative immersion allows participants to deepen their understanding of these challenges through self-expression.

Our hope is that this micro-course which runs at the start of the semester throughout September, will be transformative in for participants and help them approach their studies throughout the rest of the semester with fresh eyes and poetry in their hearts and minds. The deadline for application to the course is 15 April, and more details on how to apply can be found here: https://www.sol.lu.se/en/course/ENGC18/

[1] Didham, Robert J.  2022. Poetic Learning for a Sustainable Future: Transforming our Collective Story. In Poetry and Sustainability in Education, edited by Sandra Lee Kleppe and Angela Sorby, 121-145. Palgrave Macmillan.

[2] Jack, Kirsten, and Sam Illingworth. 2024. Poetry and Pedagogy in Higher Education: A Creative Approach to Teaching, Learning and Research. Bristol University Press.

01/04/2025

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Ola Leifler’s demonstration of large-scale social simulations (“Megagames”) yesterday

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 not really, but at least a little bit more after yesterday’s demonstration.

On the image above you see part of the setup: There were three main areas on big tables where most of the discussion during game rounds happens, and where there are boardgame-like elements — a geography, cards that represent resources like fossil fuels or college graduated, plans of what to collect in order to be able to buy something, and much more. Facilitators organize the game in rounds and can intervene in the game in many ways, for example by closing down a stock exchange due to extreme weather, or just by ending the game a round before everybody expects it to end. Participants get individual role descriptions (1-2 pages long) with different pieces of background information and cues to how their role might act. Mine was a low-income senior citizen who had worked hard all their life to create the country we all live in, with a lot of time on their hands to attend meetings and let others know about the experiences they have collected. Another senior citizen had the superpower of rolling a dice once every round to make the choice between different options that the facilitator offers! Other roles included politicians or climate activists. Between rounds, participants can check in with their team mates (for example all the other low-income citizens) and discuss strategies for the next round.

The experience — even though it was just a demo and not the actual game, and even though we were way fewer people than can be engaged in the game — was chaotic. But that is also the point: This is not a game where we can understand the complexity and optimize strategy; the experience really drives home the need for conversation and collaboration. You definitely do experience complexity, even though the system is extremely simplified compared to the real world; for example international trade is just a mechanic in the game and not an active player, and there is only a handful of companies that work on non-overlapping products and services. The game is intentionally set up in the sweet spot between role playing, board games and simulations — not as overwhelming and complex as a full-on simulation, but more free than a classical boardgame, and with some of the creativity but much less of the performance aspect of role plays. And it is really engaging, even just in the demo version!

If you are interested to learn more, you can read more about the game here, and if you are really keen to experience it in full soon, you might consider to join a session in Stockholm on April 28: Megagame – Changing the Game of Consumption. Or to let us know — we are planning to invite Ola back to run the full game with us, so if you want to join (alone, or with a group of people) be in touch!

21/03/2025

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Invitation: Teaching Sustainability – a teacher-led grassroots initiative for course development

We are excited to invite you to the final presentations of projects in the Collegial project course “Teaching Sustainability for a Circular Built Environment”!

Day: 22/4 2025

Time: 8:30-12:00

Place: Pepparholm, Studiecentrum LTH, John Ericssons väg 4

Calendar event available here.

In this course, 9 teachers of a wide variety of courses in the Civil Engineering (V) programme at LTH took the grassroot initiative to improve teaching of circularity and sustainability throughout the programme, both in individual courses and in collaboration.

We will present 4 projects that have been/will very soon be implemented in existing courses, to share our experiences, learning, and potentially transferrable ideas, and to get your feedback. We hope to inspire more similar projects and collaborations!

So that we have enough coffee and fika for everyone, please register using the following link: https://forms.office.com/e/UrSMuN10Bf

We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Jonas Niklewski, Ivar Björnsson, and Mirjam Glessmer

21/03/2025

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