Teaching for Sustainability

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?

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.„ -- bell hooks My Pedagogy The challenges that face us are complex, …

In November 2023, we ran a workshop on using Serious Games in Teaching for Sustainability. Here, we give a short summary of that event

I am one of the people behind initiating this blog, and in this post I give you a quick idea about who I am and why I do what I do. This probably shines through in most things I write, but if you are curious about me, this is the place to start!

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), 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!

This is the first official poster about our work and the vision we have for developing community