Where do we even start when we are thinking about including discussions related to sustainability in courses that are not explicitly about sustainability? Structural engineers Ivar and Jonas share their own approach, discuss some literature-based recommendations, and invite us into conversation!

The structures we use for discussions have an influence both who speaks and who gets heard. Using structures where everybody is included and where ideas can be evaluated independently of who had them contributes to a more inclusive environment in which a wider range of perspectives is considered and solutions are improved. Here are two examples of such "Liberating Structures"

There are many factors that make it difficult to have conversations about sustainability. In this blogpost, I present the "Spiral of Silence" model, based on work by Crease & Singhasaneh (2023), that shows many of those factors

Teaching for sustainability does not necessarily mean that we explicitly address content or skills related to sustainability. It can also, or additionally, mean that we teach in ways where we invite all students to participate and to personally connect to the topic. Here is a summary of an article (very much recommended reading in the original!!!) that gives 21 easy tips for how to do that

A useful model to consider when planning or reflecting on teaching of topics in sustainability or climate change. It's not just the wheels of knowledge and skills that make a bike work, you also need a frame, support, a goal that you are heading towards. The analogy works surprisingly well, according to the study presented here, but also to personal experience!

We often think of possible responses to fear as fight, flight, or freeze. It is easy to transfer this thinking on our teaching about topics like sustainability and climate change: in response to realising the extent of the problems we are facing, students can step up and take action, they can just not engage with the material and ignore the threat as much as possible (if I don't think about it, it can't be real, can it?), or they can get paralysed by the enormity of the problem. According to this study, though, this is very unlikely to happen if you do "feat appeals" right.

Teaching sustainability can never be only about the cognitive aspects, the "head" part, of learning. If we want students to fully engage with a topic, there need to be some aspects of both "heart" and "hands" involved, too. This is a super useful framework to think about our teaching -- which aspects are we currently engaging? And what might we want to do to engage also other aspects?