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Education for Sustainability: Countdown to Winter Break Compilation

This December, we have shared a range of resources in our Teams-channel as a countdown to winter break. We hope that you have found or will find these helpful and inspiring! In this blog post, you find all the resources in one place.

Some of the resources are podcast episodes, others are web pages, TED-talks, or book chapters. Some are easily absorbed others perhaps need a bit more time to digest and could be something we return to in a seminar or workshop. What do you think? Was there anything in particular that caught your interest? We would love to hear your feedback – feel most welcome to email education@sustainability.lu.se with your thoughts and ideas!

Happy Holidays! Looking forward to continuing our work in 2026!

❄️ Education for Sustainability BINGO

First up: our BINGO! This is a playful way of trying some quick things to include more sustainability in our education. Perhaps challenge a colleague and see who gets BINGO first?!   A “Teaching for Sustainability” Bingo – Teaching for Sustainability

❄️ Can Education be Serious Fun?!

Our next resources is a tip from our book club reading Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education. In story No. 3, Sarah Honeychurch suggests that education can and should be serious fun – an enjoyable and engaging adventure while also learning and doing something meaningful. One part of this is to use assessment as learning and a chance to take risks and learn from this.

In one practical example, students pick a few activities: “They then complete the activities they choose (receiving assistance to learn any necessary digital skills) and submit them along with a reflective blog post. Their classmates (and even their tutor) will then comment to give feedback on each activity, and there is then time and space for revisions to be made. Getting things “wrong” in this scenario is not viewed as failure, and learners can afford to experiment and take risks because there is time and space to make revisions in light of feedback. Later in the course they will choose a selection of their creations that they are happy with (again to a specified number of stars) and resubmit these for formal grading.” (p. 42).

What do you think of this activity? Have you tried something similar?

❄️ Student Podcast: Climate Fresk

Have you tried a serious game in class this year? What worked well and what could be improved?

In the podcast “Sustainability Speaking Beyond the Aula”, students from the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) discuss sustainability research, practices, policy, and legislation. In this specific episode, Justine Auvrignon – student and Climate Fresk facilitator – discusses serious games with researcher Léa Levy, previously at the Faculty of Engineering. While the focus is on the Climate Fresk, the discussion also covers serious games more generally and Léa talks about one of our Teaching for Sustainability-workshops on serious games and the advantages that she sees with using serious games in teaching more generally. Happy listening! https://share.transistor.fm/s/66bd1949

❄️ Philosophy of Science

What is the Role of Science in Transformative Change for Sustainability?

Dear Community, are you curious about Philosophy of Science and how it can help us advance sustainability? In December, we organised a Transformation Thursday discussing how Philosophy of Science can be valuable in advancing sustainability – a topic we are planning on returning to in spring. Until then, this lecture gives a lot of food for thought on the role of universities: Prof Jem Bendell Lecture on Universities, Climate and Deep Adaptation

❄️ How can we Teach in Turbulent Times?

In her keynote at the Teaching and Learning conference at the University of Bergen this autumn, Anne-Kathrin Peters, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, shares her thoughts on and research about education that makes a difference in turbulent times. She uses a set of reflection questions from the book “Active Hope” to structure her talk and invite others to think with her about what we love, what our concerns are, and what inspires us despite our concerns. Anne talks about what the problem with the current and past educational systems are and how to change the system. Watch the keynote here: Anne-Kathrin Peters – Education in Turbulent Times

❄️ Active Hope

We continue our countdown to winter break/advent calendar with some food for thought from the book Active Hope.

If you looked at the keynote by Anne-Kathrine Peters, you recognise the following prompts that Anne uses to structure her presentation:

  • I love [fill in]
  • Looking at the future we are heading towards, my concerns are [fill in]
  • Facing these concerns, what inspires me is [fill in]

These questions are a set of 7 questions presented in a book called Active Hope. The book is available at the library, and Mirjam (Glessmer) has summarised it in a blog post where she also shares a figure with the questions posed that could be used at, for instance, workshops with colleagues: Currently reading about “Active hope” (Macy & Johnstone, 2022) – Adventures in Ocea…

❄️ Debunking Myths in Education for Sustainability

Is Education for Sustainability only about the environment? Does more knowledge lead to more action for sustainability?

In this podcast episode, Professor Marco Rieckmann, University of Vechta, debunks some common myths regarding Education for Sustainability and discusses cultural differences between different concepts: Episode5 – Marco Rieckmann- Sustainability Education Podcast Happy listening!

❄️ PhDForum – an online study room for community and support

How can virtual spaces create ommunity and boost motivastion?

Here comes another gem from our Book Club on Stories of Hope Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education | Open Book Publishersnamely a PhD (and others) online study room, which seems to have become somewhat of an online success: https://www.thephdforum.com/study-room It is open not only to PhD students but also postdocs or other academics in need of a silent but supportive online study community. Loneliness is a risk factor for our wellbeing, and this is a resources that is always available. Take care!

❄️ Communication styles that inspire action on climate change

We often say that knowing about sustainability is not enough to inspire action towards sustainability, but what then does inspire action?

This Ted-talk has a few years on it, but (unfortunately) still seems relevant: Per Espen Stoknes: How to transform apocalypse fatigue into action on global warming | TED Talk. in this talk, Per Espen Stoknes presents five mechanisms that explain why we tend to shut down when we hear about climate change – distance, doom, dissonance, denial, identity -and how to instead create motivation and willingness to act by telling new(ish) stories that make us feel that the climate crisis is near, personal, and urgent.

❄️ Microaggressions in the Classroom

How can we spot microaggressions in the classroom and how can we best  act on them once spotted?

Microagressions can be hard to spot for someone not personally affected but can really take a toll on someone who is and therefore is an important training in empathy and a reminder of comments and actions to look out for: MICROAGGRESSIONS IN THE CLASSROOM

❄️ Head-Hands-Heart-Model

Are we teaching with our heads, hands and hearts?

The countdown continues with another addition from our book club and one of the stories that seems to have been most inspiring namely No. 6 “The human and nothing but the whole human: With head, heart, and hand”. This story proposes the concept of unconditional positive (self)-regard as a framework to build supportive and empathetical work environments at HEIs for students and educators alike. It also refers to the head-heart-hands model which in brief proposes that we should try to include not just knowledge (head – cognitive function) but also our senses and place (hands – what we do) and emotions (heart – unconditional positive regard) to build supportive environments as discussed in this chapter, but also to empower action for sustainability. Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education | Open Book Publishers

❄️ More serious gaming – with Playmobil?!

Have you used LEGO, Playmobil Pro, or other building blocks or figures in your teaching?

I had not heard of Playmobil Pro until I read about it in our Book Club “Stories of Hope”. Turns out one can order sets and use them to teach all kinds of students – here is a very short video with examples from business, accounting, and marketing: Using Playmobil Pro for playful learning but I am yet to find examples from sustainability specifically. Have you heard about this or even tried yourself?

If you want to read the short chapter in the book, it is story No. 18 Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education | Open Book Publishers “Playing with learning: Adopting a playful approach to Higher Education learning and teaching” by John Parkin.

❄️Are we more inclined to preserve species if we know their names?

How can we connect individuals to the natural world and thereby spark an interest in the preservation of our natural environment?

Have you heard about plant blindness? Are we interested in saving something if we do not know what it is or what it is called? Perhaps the study of botany could lead to higher interest in preserving nature?! If you are interested in these questions, you might be interested in the Botanic Gardens Education Network: Bgen | Home The network “supports and builds capacity in educators and community engagers in natural and plant science, biodiversity and sustainability, visitor engagement, audience development, evaluation and funding”. Read more about the benefits of studying botany in our Book Club-book and story No. 19 Stories of Hope – 19. Making plants cool again

19/12/2025

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Presentation at “Ett LU för Alla”: “The process is the point: An inclusive LU for a sustainable world”

Today, Terese and myself (Mirjam) are presenting at LU’s conference on inclusive teaching: “Ett LU för Alla“.

This is the abstract for our presentation:

“How we show up in the world matters. Discover how ongoing efforts at LU are shaping a sustainable future. Engage in discussions on building a world where inclusivity and sustainability go hand in hand. Join Terese Thoni, Education Coordinator at the Sustainability Forum and Mirjam S. Glessmer, Senior Lecturer and Educational Developer at Centre for Engineering Education (CEE), as they explore the importance of inclusivity in sustainability education.”

Some resources that we want to share with you:

  • The slides for our presentation (pdf)
  • The model “Teaching about, with, in, through, for Sustainability” is described in this blogpost
  • The website that collects information about sustainability education at LU here
  • The article by Tanner (2013) on 21 strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity here
  • Our Teaching for Sustainability Bingo as a pdf to print or share

As always: you are very welcome to reach out to us, we look forward to hearing from you! 🙂

20/11/2025

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A chat on “how to teach for sustainability”

Robert Kordts and myself (Mirjam) recently led the “Learning and Teaching in Higher Education” LTHEChat on bluesky on the topic of “how to teach for sustainability” (see our six discussion questions and links to the resulting discussions at the end of this post!). In preparation of the chat, we wrote the blogpost below, which was first published on their blog. I am sharing it here to remind you of the “Teaching about, with, in, through, for Sustainability” model that we think is a really useful way to start approaching the topic.

The title of the blog post, “How to teach for sustainability”, might sound like we have the answer, but to be clear right away – we do not. But we invite you to address this, the biggest challenge that we as teachers and academic developers are facing, with us, and to hopefully come a little bit closer to answering the question how we can learn – and teach – for a sustainable world.

In this blog post, we suggest different ways to think about teaching for sustainability. We acknowledge that most teachers are not experts on sustainability (which, arguably, do not exist, since sustainability is a wicked problem and solutions need to be co-created locally and globally), that we are all pressed for time, that there are many other tasks and challenges competing for our attention. Given all that, where does one start?

In January 2025, Kyle Bartlett posted on bluesky about five forms to think about teaching for sustainability in music education. We took this framework and translated it first into Engineering Education but have since used it in higher education more generally because we find it to be a helpful tool to explore different facets of what is important to consider. In the following, we will thus explore what it might mean to teach about, with, in, through, and for sustainability.

Teaching about sustainability

Teachers starting out on their sustainability journey often begin with teaching *about* sustainability, i.e. teaching about general concepts related to sustainability, for example about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, about climate change, about planetary boundaries. This is not surprising, since most of the resources that are easily available to use or adapt, especially by obvious authorities on the topic like UN bodies and national governments, are designed for the broadest audiences possible, and therefore very general.

While it is important that students have a general understanding of those concepts, the danger is that many teachers are implementing very similar, introductory content so that sustainability, in the students’ perception, might become narrow, repetitive, boring, and disconnected from the course’s or program’s content and therefore not relevant to their studies and their lives. There is also the danger of token discussions when sustainability might be seen as sufficiently addressed after basic concepts have been clarified.

Teaching with sustainability

Another common approach is to teach *with* sustainability: including examples of sustainability applications within the discipline (for example solar panels or carbon neutral bridges in engineering, international negotiations in law, the effect of heat waves on humans in medicine, reimagining monetary systems in economy, and many more). It is very important that students think about sustainability in the context of their subjects! However, examples alone are not enough. If we want to address the bigger picture, it is necessary to connect sustainability and teaching in other ways. We want to challenge teachers to also consider teaching *in*, *through*, and *for* sustainability.

Teaching in sustainability

Teaching *in* sustainability positions the discipline as part of a sustainable world. This means remembering that we are acting as role models for professional and personal responsibility (whether we want to or not), so we should explicitly talk about sustainability as an integrated part of our own and the students’ future professional role. In their article “Do not leave your values at the door”, Nooij et al. (2025) remind us that inaction isn’t neutral, and that what is perceived as activism and permissible depends a lot on whether people agree with the stance, and on whether people are aware that they are not objective themselves.

Teaching in sustainability can also include teaching about how to cope with climate anxiety – sharing our own experiences and emotions, holding space for conversations with students, and pointing to resources. Eriksson et al. (2022) share ways how one might do this.

Teaching through sustainability

Teaching *through* sustainability is about practicing today how we hope to live and work together in a sustainable world. This is not something that we can expect to just magically happen; it needs practicing – both in the sense of repeatedly doing it to get better, and as being in the habit of doing it. Teaching through sustainability means using sustainable pedagogies which are both transformative and emancipatory and facilitate an inclusive and equitable learning environment. A great place to start is to consider that “the magic of inclusion: transformative action for sustainability education” by Ahlberg et al. (2025), or more practically the “Liberating Structures” and Tanner (2013)’s “teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity”.

Teaching for sustainability

Teaching *for* sustainability means inspiring action for sustainable development. It is not enough to have knowledge and understanding, and competencies and skills. We also need to develop our judgement and approach – and foster the will and the drive to use our freedom to do good things in the world. How can we empower students to take action towards a sustainable world?

The literature has generally converged on what competencies students will need to learn to meet those challenges, and Redman & Wiek (2021) suggest a framework which puts the key competencies in sustainability (the four interconnected planning competencies systems-, futures-, values-, and strategies thinking) as well as implementation and integration competence in the context of other professional, disciplinary, and general competencies. While some of these competencies can be practiced independently, their integration – and practicing them in an integrated way – is key (and thus even highlighted as its own competence). How can we ensure our students have the opportunity to learn this?

References

Ahlberg, S., Kennon, P., & Rončević, K. (2025). The Magic of Inclusion: Transformative Action for Sustainability Education. All means all!-OpenTextbook for diversity in education. https://book.all-means-all.education/

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. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICT4S55073.2022.00020

Nooij, J. M., Collin, N. D. H. & van den Berg, F. (2025). “Do not leave your values at the door; the permissibility of activism in the lecture hall”, Higher Education Research & Development, 44:6, 1512-1527, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2025.2514508

Redman, A., & Wiek, A. (2021, November). Competencies for advancing transformations towards sustainability. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 6, p. 785163). Frontiers Media SA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.785163

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. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-06-0115

6 questions

The links at “Q1”, “Q2” etc bring you to the questions on Bluesky, where you can also see all the responses (no login required!).

Q1: What do you think is the most important knowledge, skill, attitude our students need to learn to contribute to a sustainable world?

Q2: What would you recommend to someone who wants to implement sustainability in their teaching but does not know where to start? What resources, networks, mindsets?

Q3: If you had a minute, a morning, a month to spend on preparing new teaching for sustainability, where would you put your focus?

Q4: How do you balance authenticity, professionality, activism, departmental and student expectations, …?  In your work, in your life?

Q5: What resources or support would you need to (more) confidently teach for sustainability? Where might you find them or who might provide them?

Q6: What action do you want to commit to inspired by today’s #LTHEChat?

19/11/2025

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First meeting on the new book in our book club: “Stories of hope: reimagining education”

Yesterday, we started our second book club (read about the first one here), this time on “Stories of hope: reimagining education” by Abegglen et al. (2025). We chose that book because we felt that it is so easy to feel overwhelmed in the jobs that we are in, and especially when doing that working on Teaching for Sustainability, so we wanted to read something uplifting, yet helping us on our way forward. The book is a collection of short(ish) visions for the education of the future, collected under several main topics (like systems change or creative curriculum). Yesterday, we started easy and just took the first story in the collection to read and discuss:

Inverting the distribution of Higher Education: From top-down to student-led (Heller and Leeder, 2025)

Heller and Leeder (2025) propose a vision of education that resonates very much with me personally. They want education to be distributed and inclusive, meaning in their case that open-access courses are offered by universities (where the academics contributing to develop and run the courses would gain “academic rewards” through some sort of peer-review system, which would be valued like research rewards) and students would access the courses online, receive guidance from a mentor affiliated with the course, possibly in a local hub, and receive points that are given and accepted by the network of partner universities. They start their chapter with fictional quotes of what stakeholders would say, for example students about how they can flexibly access quality education from anywhere (meaning they can choose to move to or stay wherever they want to live, and reduce the carbon footprint that would come with commuting), but still have the social component in a local hub. But also for the academics, this model would feel more rewarding, both because they can contribute to a meaningful project and live their creativity and collegiality, and because their contribution would be valued by their students and their employers. What’s not to love?

One question that I brought up was if “micro credits” for lots of small courses that students choose freely might just not be enough if we want people to dive into complex topics over a long period of time (but then nobody says that you cannot have both). But will people still want to work towards their Bildung/bildning when the path isn’t prescribed by some authority? Everybody yesterday seemed to agree that there are certainly people who would still strive to continuously learn and be better (and in a way we are all examples of that, giving up our lunch break for a book club), but maybe especially young students who have not learned how to learn yet might need some form of guidance (turning the gaze and redirecting students’ attention is, after all, the most important task of a teacher, according to Biesta!), which is not described in that chapter. And of course there might be some types of education where having a real “program” might still be a good idea (for example in medicine, where one would hope that future doctors do some things not just virtually but under the in-person supervision of experienced doctors…).

One thing I was a bit surprised by was how much the other participants of yesterday’s discussion did not like online learning (while we were in an online book club, that still seemed to be rewarding, and that we were running online to cut down on commuting times for everybody) and wanted the physical meeting with students. Whereas for me, the local hubs do a lot of the work in the vision described above (although that’s more in my head than described in that vision). But all those teachers that develop all these creative and exciting courses have to live somewhere, too, so some of them might also be “mentors” in those hubs. To me, it seems really appealing to be sitting in some remote place with beautiful nature, develop courses on topics that I am passionate about, but also meet with the local community to mentor and coach people as they make their way through this much bigger educational landscape. I imagine it would be so enriching to mentor students in subjects that are very different from mine, while they get the specific disciplinary input and feedback remotely from someone else.

In a way, I feel like I have already seen glimpses of this model come to life, for example with the Contemporary Approaches to University Teaching MOOC, which is a co-created and peer-reviewed project, now open and free to attend for teachers worldwide, where you can pick different paths and gain some kind of certificate along the way, too. It is also the vision that we have for our MOOC — for it to be open to, and without costs for anyone, bringing together a network of colleagues as contributors, with guidance that we provide for motivated teachers or academic developers to easily facilitate online and local communities.

Reading this chapter felt inspiring, and discussing it with colleagues to hear about their visions for the future of education and maybe in the longer run create a shared vision feels re-energizing. Do you want to join the book club next time? We will be all reading one or more chapters of part 1 (everybody can choose for themselves which chapter(s) to read), and then discuss systems change more broadly. Join our Teams for more information!

P.S.: Last night, I had a conversation about a specific online learning platform — “try hack me” — with someone who has been maintaining a streak on that platform for quite a while and is always super motivated to return and work more on it. So I wondered: What is it that makes learning on that platform so much fun? The platform offers (paid) certificates (maybe similar to the micro credits described in the chapter above, although judging from the description of the requirements that does not sound “micro”, but quite substantial…) but also public profiles that could of course shared in an application or with a boss, a leader board that you can filter by country, different levels with cool names like “wizard” or “legend”, but also monthly leagues where you can compete on how many points you collect during a specific month and not just points overall (which might be very demotivating if you start and are then competing with people who have been working on it for years). But my impression was that the main appeal is that it is the right level of challenging, that you get to do real tasks to show your learning and not just answer MCQs, that the topics are just super interesting (and there is a lot of choice not just between different pathways but also between different rooms within each pathway). So there are good examples of online learning out there (that people return to over years!) that we can look to for inspiration and learn from!

Abegglen, S., Heller, R. F., Madhok, R., Neuhaus, F., Sandars, J., Sinfield, S., & Gitanjali Singh, U. (2025). Stories of hope: reimagining education. https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0462

24/10/2025

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New Strategy for Education for Lund University 2025-2027

Photo with flowers and bee, in the background Lund University main building.

The Strategy for Education, approved just before summer, builds on the university’s strategic platform. It deepens the prioritised areas highlighted in the platform and makes it more specific for education. The strategy is operationalised through the Education Board’s annual plans and is available in English and Swedish. Below, I provide a summary focusing on the parts that concern sustainability specifically.

The platform has three overarching themes – sustainability, innovation, and digitalisation – and sustainability is highlighted throughout the education strategy as well. The education strategy highlights five core values:

  1. Academic freedom
  2. Democracy
  3. Training
  4. Equal opportunities
  5. Sustainability

All five core values could be seen as important in achieving a sustainable future and a university that works for sustainability. Academic freedom has to do with protecting the core of academia and that no external force should dictate research or education. Democracy and equal opportunities are core values in any sustainable future and part of the Agenda 2030. “Training” – translated from “bildning” in the Swedish version with its equivalent “Bildung” in German, makes me think of sustainability competencies and what we mean by being competent. While we generally think of sustainability competencies as something that we can train – otherwise there would not be much point in writing about it – they also often lean towards something more innate as well – an inner quality that not only requires training but a degree of personal growth and maturing.

For sustainability specifically, the strategy states that:

“We integrate sustainability into our education, research and support activities in order to contribute to a sustainable future for later generations. Lund University is an attractive, secure and sustainable workplace in which the teaching staff are given the conditions to conduct excellent education and opportunities for professional development” (Strategy for Education: Lund University 2025-2027, p. 3).

It further argues that geopolitical uncertainties, climate change and other challenges mean that education, competence development and lifelong learning will be increasingly important. The Education Strategy builds on the strategic platform of the university (2025-2027), which, unsurprisingly then, has a similar message: “Students […] need to be able to navigate in a geopolitically complex world with major issues to deal with such as climate change. The extensive societal challenges and the uncertain future regarding the labour market’s needs require students not only to obtain specialised knowledge but also broad, generic knowledge that can be augmented as required” (Platform for Strategic Work: Lund University 2025-2027, p. 6). The Strategy for Education specifically mentions existential sustainability and that education can help build existential sustainability. Here, the strategy touches on a potential challenge and balancing act: while it is important that education at Lund University is flexible and can be adapted to society’s needs, it also needs to be robust and grounded in science. The strategy does not elaborate further on how to potentially negotiate between the extensive timeframes of science with the much more volatile and quickly changing societal and political landscape.

Looking at career paths, the strategy speaks of the importance of teaching as part of academic career progression and teaching staff is encouraged to pursue continuous professional development.

When it comes to direct impacts from education, the strategy highlights that intercultural aspects are important – both in terms of course content but also in terms of international experiences for both students and staff. Internationalisation is a common trade-off for higher education institutions as this often means airborne travels and increased emissions. However, the strategy emphasises opportunities for travel-free international experiences for instance through international course collaborations.

It will be interesting to follow the work by the Board of Education and how the strategy gets operationalised through its annual plans!

21/10/2025

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“Higher Education Didactics for Sustainability” Spring 2026 now open for registration!

The registration for the course Higher Education Didactics for Sustainability (HEDS) Spring 2026 is now open!

🧑‍🏫 Open to: Educators or pedagogical developers in higher education

🕰️ Scope: The course is equivalent to 80 hours full-time work, approx. 6 hours/ week, mostly as online collaborative groupwork

📅 Dates: 19 January-29 April 2026

🌐 Place: Online

➡️ Registration and more information: HEDS until 8 December (notification of acceptance on December 22nd)

💶 Course fee: No fee!

The course covers topics like competencies for sustainability, pedagogical approaches, and the role of the university in transforming to a sustainable world, and based on input on those topics, the main focus is on online collaborative group work with colleagues from all over the world.

This is the third year that the initiative “Teaching for Sustainability” is involved in HEDS, last year Terese co-led the topic “connecting with the world and each other”. You can watch a recording of the session here, including a presentation by Marlis Wullenkord, Environmental Psychologist at Lund University,  about eco-emotions and coping strategies in educational settings (we are summarising a different presentation of hers here).

Feedback from participants in previous years is that while this course is very intense, it also offers a supportive community, inspiring exchange of experiences, and deep, transformative conversations, which impact the approach to teaching for sustainability. This is also the impression that both Terese and Mirjam have gotten through their involvement. If you are an earlier participant, you can still (until November 6th) volunteer to contribute as facilitator or co-facilitator here.

If you have questions about the course, please contact terese.thoni@cec.lu.se

09/10/2025

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DPSIR – a Tool to Practice Sustainability Competencies with Students

In this 5-minute presentation (link to video below), Sara Gabrielsson, senior lecturer at LUCSUS, presents the DPSIR-framework with examples for each part. The framework was developed by the European Environment Agency and can be used to analyse causes and effects of environmental problems.

DPSIR stands for: Drivers, Pressures, State, Impacts and Responses:

  • Drivers can come from different economic sectors or human activities that fulfill a need in our society. They can be identified on an individual level (e.g. food and entertainment) and a collective level (e.g. transportation and agriculture).
  • These drivers cause pressure on the environment through various production or consumption processes. Examples of pressures include increased use of natural resources and land-use change such as deforestation.
  • The pressure in turn affects the state of the environment. This state is a combination of all the physical, chemical, biological, and epidemiological conditions of a specific place and they include components that can be measured such as the quality of air, water or soil.
  • The changes in the state of the environment impacts the functioning of ecosystems, with consequences for the system’s ecological sustainability, economic stability and social performance.
  • To deal with these oftentimes undesired impacts policy makers or other societal actors can implement different types of responses directed towards any part of the chain between drivers to impacts, such as efforts to reduce emissions.

The DPSIR-framework could, inter alia, be used in workshops to kick start a discussion and data collection or be used as an analytical tool in theses or reflection papers. Given its process-oriented construction, it is one hands-on example of an activity that trains several sustainability competencies including systems-thinking and anticipatory-thinking (you can read more about sustainability competencies for instance in this paper by Redman & Wiek 2022: Frontiers | Competencies for Advancing Transformations Towards Sustainability).

The framework was developed to analyse environmental problems, but with some tweaking, perhaps it could be used for other types of sustainability problems. What do you think? Have you used this framework in your teaching? Let us know in the comments – it would be great to collect examples, experiences and hints and tips!

Watch Sara’s presentation here: Sara Gabrielsson: Analyzing human-environment interactions using DPSIR – YouTube

The presentation was developed as part of the course Universities and the Agenda 2030 – teaching, learning and acting on the Sustainable Development Goals. You can access the course as a self-study compendium here, with further videos, material and discussion questions: Universites and the Agenda 2030.pdf

Photo credit: Ann Åkerman

01/10/2025

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Poetry for Sustainability?

Today, we tried a new format of our “Transformation Thursdays” (come-as-you-are informal lunch meetings where colleagues who are interested in Teaching for Sustainability can join us to chat about Teaching for Sustainability. No preparation required, but you are welcome to bring questions and topics if you like!) — first of all, it was a Wednesday, and second of all, today we had a topic: “Poetry for Sustainability”.

For today’s meeting, Ellen Turner and Barbara Barrow from the Centre for Languages and Literature here at Lund University suggested we read two poems: Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, and Craig Santos Perez “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (after Wallace Stevens)”. And that was so interesting!

We talked about a lot of different aspects: How in the first verse in one poem everything is still and only the eye is moving, the perception of the world is changing, whereas in the other one the glaciers are collapsing but nothing moves to do something about it. How the ending, “The glacier fits In our warm-hands” is so powerful and touching. How for some people glaciers and polar bears are so far removed from their realities that they are difficult to relate to. And how we could use poetry in our Teaching for Sustainability. I think asking people to write poetry to express thoughts is, similar to the six-word stories that we currently use a lot in focus group interviews, a great method to help people get to the point. It emboldens them to be very clear in their language, because they have the excuse that they “had to” in such a short form.

We also talked about many other topics, and I always get a lot of energy from talking with people who want to make a difference! So I think this was very successful, and I look forward to doing something similar again soon!

A group of teachers meeting around a lunch table to discuss poetry

Are you curious? Here is a reading list recommended by Ellen and Barbara:

Colbert, J (1998)  “Eye of the Blackbird” from The Thirteen Ways Series: https://www.joancolbert.com/gallery/prints/thirteenways/index.htm

Illingworth, S., & Jack, K. (2024). Poetry and pedagogy in higher education: A creative approach to teaching, learning and research. Policy Press. https://doi.org/10.56687/9781447372301

Kleppe, S. L., & Sorby, A. (Eds.). (2022). Poetry and Sustainability in Education. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95576-2

Perez, Craig Santos. “Recycling Poetry in a Time of Climate Change.” Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 30 Mar. 2023, https://aaww.org/recycling-poetry-in-a-time-of-climate-change/

10/09/2025

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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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