Hello everyone and welcome back to our weekly update on the project Advancing Education For Sustainability. We have been taking some time to reconnect with the natural world by swims in the ocean and lakes, hikes in the countryside and going to a tortoise’s birthday party (she was 101 years old). Several strange and wonderful books have been read and more have jumped on to our to read lists. What was your favourite author this summer?

After a relaxing summer break, we are back and ready to participate in new programmes, new course development and new collaborations across campus and afar. We have already kicked-off the semester with a week full of activity, connecting people with resources and organising events and introductory information sessions. With our questionnaire, we are now following the same class through their two year master programs with student groups at several departments across factualties at Umeå University. The feedback will be provided to support teachers to plan for the students’ own specific needs in developing their confidence in working with sustainability problems during the programs and in their future careers.

As the project continues to develop, teacher support for their education for sustainability will be developed this semester. A network of universities (Baltic University Program) have designed an ESD course for teachers to workshop ideas about how you can tackle your sustainability challenges. The course starts in September and all are welcome to take part.

There will also be several ESD courses available for teachers at UMU to take over the academic year. UPL have organised support both in English and in Swedish that can be taken in the autumn and spring. If you are interested about this course, you can learn more about their work on the webpage, just click below.

We will also be presenting and taking part in a new workshop series called KLIV, with UPL at Umeå university, which will start shortly. The workshop series will be both on campus and via zoom, so that off campus teachers can take part whereever you are located. An update on times and dates will come soon. The aim of the workshop series is to create collaboration and cocreation across the campus regarding our ESD work. If you are interested in taking part, stay tuned and we’ll let you know about details for the next meeting. We hope to hear from more of you soon!