Advancing Education For Sustainability

Steven Curtis, Pedagogical Developer at Lund University, joined us this week to discuss how we can support each other in our work with education for sustainability. His background experience in technology, including video, audio and web development as well as a large passion in education for sustainability will be a great contribution to our project. We will contribute by providing opportunities for teachers at Lund University to help create inspiration for activities in sustainability teaching. Thank you for your work, Steven, and thank you for your continued contributions to the sharing community of ESDers in Sweden.

At Umeå University, in an UTRI supported event, we had a Teachers’ DIY Conference on Education for Sustainable Development. Teachers from across the campus came together to share their experiences about different activities to teaching for sustainability in their disciplines. Lecturers provided examples of using backcasting, debate, art and games to inspire students to engage in sustainability challenges. Techniques of using activities as forms of assessment were also discussed. Thank you to everyone who came to share, discuss and collaborate ideas and thank you to everyone involved with the organisation.

Judith Waller, Lecturer in Environmental science and Additive Manufacturing at Mid-Sweden university, reached out to us to hear more about the project. Judith has begun the journey to apply new methods to her classes in order to help students’ learning for sustainability. She shared with us her ideas about a new course that she is designing about sustainability in Additive Manufacturing on a new master program the university will hold in the Autumn. The work she is doing as program coordinator of the undergraduate program at the university will also develop student competencies for sustainability. We look forward to supporting your work to provide a learning progression approach to program and course development of sustainability competencies. Thank you for a great talk today and we look forward to following you on this fantastic journey.

Also, we would like to thank Pamela Bachmann-Vargas, aPostdoc at the Geography department at Umeå University, who shared her work about applying Art and games in education for sustainability. Pamela has experience with different methods of art and games in higher education at Wageningen University, Netherlands. Her experience with colleagues creating games for education in sustainability has inspired the geography department at Umeå university to develop their methods on master programs. More about the development of the sustainability master programs at the geography department will be coming soon, as we catch up with program developers to find out how they have been working with our sustainability mindset mapping tool.

Thank you everyone, for a truly inspiring week. Sharing ideas and inspiring others to imagine what they can do for students regrading learning for sustainability has given much energy and encouragement. A few take aways for this week’s discussion forum is based on Jem Bendell’s talk on Deep Adaptation. If you could imagine a future; What do we want to keep? What do we want to relinquish? What do we want to bring back? What do we want to reconcile?