Teaching for Sustainability: Discussion Event on Serious Games (29 February 2024, 09:30-11:00)

Many educators use serious games in their teaching to integrate educational content, skills development, and learning outcomes into a game-like environment. This promotes student engagement, critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration. Join us as we create a space for support and discussion about this exciting pedagogical approach.

It has become clear that there is HUGE demand from educators at Lund University to facilitate a dialogue, exchange of ideas, and experience sharing around the use of serious games as a pedagogical approach (see summary of our previous event here).

During this event, we will have the opportunity:

To briefly present your own experiences or questions;
To listen or engage in discussion with other colleagues;
To generate new ideas for how to use serious games in your teaching;
To expand your network of teachers interested in using serious games.

We want to provide the opportunity to engage in discussing topics that matter to you the most! No prior knowledge or experience is needed to attend the event; however, there will be no theoretical content provided at this event. For this information, we suggest you review the summary and slides from our previous event on this topic during Fall 2023.

We will offer this workshop as a hybrid event.

The workshop will be facilitated in English.

Date, time & calendar entry

The event will take place on 29 February 2024, 09:30 to 11:00

Save the event to your calendar

Registration

Space in the room is limiting us to 15 participants; however, there is a possibility to join online. Please indicate your preferred venue for participation. Registration is open until Monday 26 February. For late registration, contact mirjam.glessmer@lth.lu.se.

Visit the registration page – forms.microsoft.com

Audience

This event is intended for teachers at Lund University, especially those who have experience in using serious games, or are considering it, as an approach to teach sustainability. Anyone interested in joining is welcome to do so!

Venue

The event will take place at Brunnen in the Studiecentrum at LTH. The entrance is located at John Ericssons väg 4. Upon entering, signage will be visible directing you to the room location.

Get directions to the venue – maps.google.com

18/01/2024

Mirjam Glessmer

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A Bicycle Model to Help Thinking About Teaching About Sustainability in a Holistic Way

Sometimes looking at different models of what is important when teaching about complex topics can be really helpful to look at our teaching in a new way, like the Head-Hands-Heart model we shared a while back. I stuck the drawing above to our coffee corner in my office, because I think it represents a really useful model for thinking about teaching about topics like sustainability, or climate change (which it was originally developed for). The model was developed by Cantell et al. (2019), where they used research in Climate Change Education and combined all the important elements into the “bicycle model”.

The model uses the analogy of a bicycle with its essential components to move forward:

Two wheels. In the model, one represents knowledge, the other thinking skills, both of which are necessary and need to play together, but neither is sufficient on its own.
A frame. All new knowledge and skills will be brought together and interpreted through the lens of the learner’s identity, values, and world view.
Chains and pedals. This represents the “real life” action that is necessary to make things move.
The saddle. In order for people to be willing to ride the bike of climate change action, motivation needs to be supported, and often that means doing things in a community and participating in something bigger.
Brakes. Not all action will lead to the desired results, sometimes there are barriers to operation, and they need to be understood and dealt with (here, in my opinion, the analogy breaks down a little bit, since the breaks on a bike are actually serving a desirable purpose in a bike. But maybe we also sometimes need to slow down and re-evalute?)
The lamp. This signifies the importance of emotions, and especially of hope, in order to scout out and decide on the way forward.
A handlebar. This is the future orientation, the vision of where to go and how to steer in the right direction to get there.

In their evaluation, Cantell et al. (2019) find that the model is useful in visualizing the complex nature of CCE, keeping it in mind when planning teaching, and even using it as a tool to evaluate teaching. It supports pedagogical reflection and I really like how easy it is to grasp all the important elements without a lot of explanations. Interestingly, the brakes that I criticize above, too, are also discussed critically, with some of the experts disagreeing with the authors on whether or not they should be included. But I agree with the authors that people need to be aware that there are barriers and what they are, so they can prepare adequately and don’t get frustrated by something that would have been foreseeable, and that discussion of common barriers helps understand each other and our behavior, so we can more easily cooperate.

The discussion-part on possible future developments of the model is also super interesting. We need collaborative action, so should we have a tandem instead? But that would take away agency from one of the cyclists, and also it would be much more difficult to move the tandem alone, even though sometimes that might be necessary. But they suggest to draw several bikes together to include that aspect, which works to make the point, but which I would then probably leave to the imagination of the reader.

How does this model help you in thinking about your teaching about sustainability? How would you modify it, or what would you use instead?

Cantell, H., Tolppanen, S., Aarnio-Linnanvuori, E., & Lehtonen, A. (2019). Bicycle model on climate change education: Presenting and evaluating a model. Environmental Education Research, 25(5), 717-731.

15/01/2024

Mirjam Glessmer

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But What If Our Students Get Paralysed By Fear?

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. Obviously, the first option is what we want to achieve, but we have seen disengaged students and inaction often enough to be worried that exposing students to fear-inducing messages will lead to those reactions.

Tannenbaum et al. (2015) investigate the literature on “fear appeals”: messages designed to change behaviour though creating fear in the recipients that if they don’t follow that message’s advice, the consequences will harm them. In their meta-analysis of 127 articles on different aspects of fear appeals, Tannenbaum et al. (2015) consider many different facets that can potentially influence whether a fear appeal works or not: what exactly the message is, the desired behaviour, and who the audience is.

They come to the surprising conclusion that “(a) fear appeals are effective at positively influencing attitude, intentions, and behaviors; (b) there are very few circumstances under which they are not effective; and (c) there are no identified circumstances under which they backfire and lead to undesirable outcomes.”

The authors find that fear appeals are most effective when the message

is written in a way that relatively high amounts of fear are intended,
includes a message reassuring the recipient that they are capable of something to mitigate undesired outcomes and that those actions will have an effect,
makes both the personal relevance and the severity of the danger conveyed in the message very clear,
targets a one-off behaviour rather than a repeated one,
and when the audience is mostly female.

What this study explicitly does not answer, however, is the influence of the source of the fear appeal (is it trustworthy? Perceived as benvolent or biased?) and the way fear appeals are delivered (e.g. graphic or audio? Social vs mass media?).

It does also not become clear how exactly this translates into teaching. Of course that was never the goal of the article, but that’s the lens through which I read it, specifically how should we deal with fear appeals when we teach about climate change or biodiversity loss? If fear appeals work best on mostly female audiences, what does that mean for our mostly male students at LTH? Are fear appeals still a promising way to go then? And we probably want repeated and sustained action, not just a one time effort?

But even with those questions unanswered, it is good to see confirmation that the positive, constructive messages, stressing what individual and collective action people can take, that “we can fix it“, are the way to go, and that — and this part I did not realise before — the fear appeal should be very concrete, focussing on the risk of personal harm and what that would look like. And — according to this study — the risk of this back-firing is very low!

Does this help you figure out how to approach difficult topics, like for example biodiversity loss, with students? For example rather than talking in general terms, point out the very local, very personal consequences of inaction, and then let them develop the actions that they can do and that will have a positive impact. And then we can always build on that later with a wider perspective.

What do you think? Let us know!

Literature:

Tannenbaum, M. B., Hepler, J., Zimmerman, R. S., Saul, L., Jacobs, S., Wilson, K., & Albarracín, D. (2015). Appealing to fear: A meta-analysis of fear appeal effectiveness and theories. Psychological bulletin, 141(6), 1178.

09/01/2024

Mirjam Glessmer

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Head-Hand-Heart: One of Our Favourite Frameworks to Approach Teaching Sustainability

One framework that seems to be very helpful when planning teaching about sustainability is the “head, hands, and heart” framework. I am using the term “framework” loosely — it is basically a Venn diagram of three overlapping areas:

intellectual aspects: the “thinking” part that most of university teaching focusses on and that we as teachers probably feel most comfortable with. Typical activities might be listening to lectures, reading scientific articles, writing reports, solving practice exercises in groups, maybe keeping learning journals
practical aspects: the “doing” aspects that are a lot less common in most study programs. Maybe there are some skills that are being taught, like using a software to design a poster that efficiently conveys information, building sound structures out of materials that are provided, using specific measurement instrumentation
emotional aspects: the “feeling” aspects that many teachers try to not get too close to, but that could include for example reflecting on values or how it feels to work in a specific group, learning how to deal with conflicts in group work, or how to motivate yourself to do something you aren’t yet motivated to do

Where these areas overlap, things get a bit more interesting.

Head and hands combines for example designing and building, reading an instrument manual and operating the instrument, …
Head and heart combines for example intellectually understanding a topic and translating it into a science poem, designing a questionnaire to figure out what needs a specific community has, …
Hands and heart combines making something for someone else’s benefit
Lastly, where head, heart, and hands overlap, students do something that is intellectually challenging and stimulating, but where they also get into the practical implementation of creating a tangible outcome that is connected to a cause and a community they care deeply about. This is what we want to aim for when teaching about sustainability, it is here that the magic is happening, students are engaged and transformed.

This framework was developed by several teams of authors independently of each other and through very different approaches, which only strengthens it in my eyes.

For Sipos et al. (2008), it was a pragmatic approach to integrating sustainability in existing curricula and still achieving transformative learning. They have two premises: 1) Students’ learning is localised, both at university in a formal context, where it is often broken into distinct subjects that are taught completely independent of each other, and in the rest of their lives, i.e. their homes, leisure-time activities, etc. This will lead to conflicts between what is learned in different contexts, unless 2) learning is situated across all those contexts in the first place, and university purposefully integrates all the non-university contexts with the other relevant communities.

Öhman and Sund (2021) develop a similar framework based on educational theories and postulate that sustainability commitment is found where the three areas overlap.

So how can this framework be useful for teachers?

Firstly, just talking about it helps raising the importance of challenging students in more areas than just intellectually, and generating conversations about how this can be done in general and more specifically. Many teachers want to support students in their emotional development and engage them in activities that are meaningful to them, but don’t necessarily feel equipped or allowed to do so.

Then, this framework is helpful as a tool to reflect on our own teaching. If we map all the activities in our course onto the different areas, are there any in the hands and hearts parts, and where the two overlap?

Lastly, it can be very useful to do a similar mapping exercises with planned teaching to check which aspect our focus is on. Most likely the intellectual part, and that’s ok! But maybe there are ways we can and want to add in some emotions or practical aspects? Or, as in the image above that maps the activities in the serious game “Biodiversity Collage” (see here for our event summary), the “hands” part is really not very inspiring. Which is true — there is really no artefact being produced that has any impact beyond the workshop itself (except if you use the collage like Léa did: she has done a competition around the best-annotated collage, which she then uses throughout the semester as organiser and to put content in the bigger context).

Trying to populate the Head-Hands-Heart Venn diagram is a fun exercise that makes you think about teaching in a different way (I share one example of that for my own “teaching sustainability” course on my personal blog). Try it and let us know how it goes!

Literature:

Sipos, Y., Battisti, B., & Grimm, K. (2008). Achieving transformative sustainability learning: engaging head, hands and heart. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Öhman, J., & Sund, L. (2021). A didactic model of sustainability commitment. Sustainability, 13(6), 3083.

09/01/2024

Mirjam Glessmer

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Meet Steven Curtis, Academic Developer at the LU Division for Higher Education Development

Steven Curtis presents to an audience. Image.

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.„
— bell hooks

My Pedagogy

The challenges that face us are complex, spanning environmental, social, cultural, political, and economic crises. Thus, I believe we need bold and transformative approaches to empower ourselves and each other. From where else in society, but in higher education, are we able to facilitate the knowledge and skills development to foster competencies of critical thinking, diligence, emotional intelligence, and resilience.

Concepts like education for sustainability provide a framework to overcome disciplinary boundaries, by considering academic, historical, and anscentral insights applied holistically to real-world challenges. However, these approaches are not prescriptive, but emancipatory, by creating the conditions for learners to develop ideas and skills independently. Thus, I see my role as an educator to ask questions, encourage creativity and curiosity, challenge assumptions (including my own), and support learners to fulfil their individual aspirations.

My Profession

My name is Steven Kane Curtis; I am an academic developer at the Division for Higher Education Development (AHU) at Lund University. I began this role in March 2023, where I am responsible for the provision of several of our basic pedagogy courses for teachers within higher education at Lund University. AHU is a central unit providing pedagogical training for educators and supervisors in our bachelors, masters, and doctoral programmes.

Learn more about AHU – lu.se

My previous education and research experience is in sustainability science, having taught courses in environmental science, research methods, and academic writing. I completed my PhD in June 2021, exploring sustainable business models within the sharing and circular economies. Moreover, I initiated and co-hosted the podcast ‘Advancing Sustainable Solutions’, where we communicated sustainability research to a general audience. In doing so, we aimed to democratise academic knowledge and articulate complexity in a digestible way for an interested audience. The podcast grew to be recognised in the top 10% of all podcasts globally, based on listenership.

Listen to past episodes of ‘Advancing Sustainable Solutions’ – transistor.fm

My Passion

In my personal life, I live on a small homestead among the forests of Småland in Sweden. There, my partner and I integrate permaculture and circular strategies to work with nature and revitalise the land and infrastructure. Thus, I spend a lot of my time reading books and engaging with content about permaculture and holistic management.

I absolutely love finding parallels between my passion for gardening and teaching. For example, permaculture advocates twelve principles, which guide the design and implementation of systems working with nature. I can’t help but identify several parallels with how one may teach, especially leveraging concepts like education for sustainability. Here are some of the permaculture principles, which are reflected in my teaching philosophy:

Use and value diversity
Creatively use and respond to change
Observe and interact
Self-regulate and accept feedback
Design from patterns to details/context
Integrate rather than segregate

By sharing this, I want to challenge you to explore the ways in which your personal passions either influence or can be shared as part of your teaching. Perhaps you play an instrument – consider starting your class with music; maybe you love to paint – how may colour theory be a useful metaphor to support learning?; for those that have children – what is something from a children’s book, which could inspire a discussion among your students? The possibility for creativity and authenticity are endless!

By connecting your passion with your profession, I hope we all can find meaning in our role as teacher and educator. For me, it is the most profound and impactful activity I can imagine, as we support our students to be able to respond to and address our sustainability challenges.

Should you wish to discuss your passion, profession, or pedagogy, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

You can reach my by email:

steven.curtis@ahu.lu.se

08/01/2024

Steven Curtis

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Serious Games in Teaching Sustainability

On November 21st, 2023, Léa Lévy and Jonas Kreutzer shared their experiences with using serious games in teaching at the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University in our seminar on “Serious games in teaching sustainability”. They use the “Climate Fresk” and “Biodiversity Collage” serious games, in which small groups of participants receive cards that depict (and sometimes also explain) concepts related to either climate change or biodiversity loss. Participants arrange cards in such a way that they can connect the cards by telling coherent, usually non-linear, stories about mechanisms, causes and consequences. Both card decks are based on reports that summarise the state of current knowledge, the IPCC and the IPBES, respectively. So by arranging the cards, participants cover all main aspects of those reports.

Léa and Jonas use these and similar games for many different purposes, for example

to let students explore and discover the content of the reports that the games are based on
to gain general knowledge about the topics of the games
to use as advance organiser for the rest of the course or even study program, when different aspects will be covered and can be pointed to in the bigger picture
to raise interest in specific aspects
to generate discussion
to create community among students who get to know each other in a new and different setting

Léa and Jonas shared their experiences in the seminar and, by facilitating parts of the game, let seminar participants also gain first-hand experiences of what it feels like to play such a serious game. They also talked us through the other, very important phases of playing such a game: The debriefing phase, where participants share their emotions, and the getting-into-action phase, where participants brainstorm what they want to learn in order to deal with the challenges they have just been confronted with, or what they can do in different settings.

We also talked about the theoretical background of what makes these games a good tool in teaching (for example by drawing on the head-hands-heart framework discussed here), but mostly participants wanted to know and discuss how to do something similar in their own teaching. The most mentioned feedback after this seminar was “inspiring!”, and “we need more time to talk!”. Thank you, Léa and Jonas, for the inspiration, and yes, we are planning a follow-up meeting!

P.S.: A longer summary (written right after the event with still a lot of adrenaline and no effort to proof-read) is available on Mirjam’s personal blog: https://mirjamglessmer.com/2023/11/21/our-seminar-today-serious-games-in-teaching-for-sustainability/

03/01/2024

Mirjam Glessmer

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Meet Mirjam Glessmer, Academic Developer at the Center for Engineering Education

Hi! My name is Mirjam Glessmer and I am part of Lund University’s Task Force on Education for Sustainability. This Task Force is coordinated by the Sustainability Forum in collaboration with the Division for Higher Education Development and the Centre for Engineering Education (CEE) at Lund University’s Faculty of Engineering, where I work as an academic developer.

As academic developer, my job is to support teachers in their role as teachers with whatever they want my support on. This makes my job both fascinating and challenging, since I often have to get into new topics very quickly in order to be able to help. “Teaching about sustainability” was one of those topics: When I started at CEE in January 2022, a group of highly engaged teachers had approached my boss and asked for a course on “how to teach sustainability”. While my teaching had touched on aspects of sustainability before, now I suddenly wanted and needed to know a lot more about theories, best practices, and suddenly “teaching about sustainability” had become an important focus for my work. I taught the course in fall 2022, and will be teaching another one now in spring 2024. For more courses, workshops, meetups and other events, check out the Task Force’s event page!

I have a personal blog where I write about my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching” (oceanography being the field where I got my PhD and did a postdoc before I transitioned into academic development full time), and there I also write about “teaching sustainability” among many other things (like connecting everyday experiences to disciplinary content — see above). You are very welcome to get in touch!

02/01/2024

Mirjam Glessmer

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Hello World!

This blog is run by Lund University’s Task Force on Education for Sustainability, coordinated by the Sustainability Forum in collaboration with the Division for Higher Education Development (AHU), and LTH Centre for Engineering Education (CEE).

We are writing this blog to share interesting ideas and articles, summaries of events, inspiration from our colleagues’ courses, and much more with other teachers at Lund University and around the world, and ideally start discussions on those topics. We are excited to have you here and invite you to read and contribute to this blog!

You are also very welcome to join our community of teachers at Lund University interested in teaching sustainability Teams team “Community of Practice (TfS)“

01/01/2024

Mirjam Glessmer

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Poster Presented at the Lund University Research Conference “Knowledge for Sustainable Development 2023”, 7/11/2023

The first poster that we presented about “us” deserves a backdated post!

Here is how we think about our community in a nutshell, presented at the Lund University Research Conference “Knowledge for Sustainable Development 2023”, 7/11/2023 (click image for pdf):