Pedagogical reflections on teaching sustainability

As researchers and educators, we have been discussing and pondering our role in promoting sustainability. While sustainability has received widespread attention it is defined, interpreted and implemented in various ways. Despite the urgency of a planetary crisis, sustainability is still often considered something distant from the core content of our teaching. In many disciplines, curricula hardly include sustainability issues.

We organised a workshop to delve into the transformative role of education in fostering sustainable development and to provide an opportunity to share thoughts and reflect on this important topic. The participants were teachers in social sciences and the built environment – not involved in pedagogical research. In the workshop, we discussed the barriers faced while integrating sustainability into teaching. After this, we shared our insights to better teach sustainability in different courses and disciplines.

One major challenge seems to be the ambiguity of the concept of sustainability. Rather than developing an exhaustive understanding of sustainability, it is important to nurture students’ critical thinking skills as defined by UNESCO. This enables students to distinguish greenwashing from substantive sustainability practices. It helps acknowledge how seemingly neutral indicators and measures shape our reality, as well as identify the societal root causes of sustainability challenges.  One way of empowering students is to tap into their existing cultural and linguistic knowledge about how “sustainability” is understood and implemented in different geographical and social contexts. This may also enable teachers to recognize that students have different normative orientations that should be considered in teaching.

Difficulties integrating sustainability into teaching practices stem from being part of a society and institution driven by competition and efficiency objectives. However, teaching sustainability is based on conscious efforts to educate future experts who can navigate and transform existing power structures. For example, challenging the self-interested and rational “homo economicus” as the ideal type of human being may enable students to focus on alternative behaviours based on altruism and collaboration. This, in turn, may have positive impacts on students’ mental health and overall well-being, and contribute to developing more inclusive and sustainable practices.

Sustainable development forces us to think about social change more broadly, not just how Finnish society works but how our actions here relate to the world via socio-ecological relations. The current global production networks reflect historical development paths stemming from the slave trade and imperialism. We should not assume that all students want to change the world, but we have noticed that many are eager to imagine alternative post-colonial and post-capitalist futures. Sometimes, students get stressed by the depressing topics and sometimes angry if the teacher presents too optimistic interpretations. We need to balance enthusiasm with practical guidance and realistic expectations. By sparking students’ creativity and encouraging them to engage openly with sustainability challenges and solutions, we help students to be better equipped to face the future.

Many of the participants in the workshop felt insecure about the current ways of teaching sustainability. There is a need for more information and education about these topics. The sustainability issues should be better integrated into our courses and all curricula. Better coordination to integrate sustainability into teaching and new interdisciplinary courses for new students were promoted. One concrete suggestion was to organise a university pedagogics course on teaching sustainability. Many teachers at Tampere University would like to improve their expertise in this area.

The workshop was sponsored by Tampere University’s profiling area of Sustainable Transformations of Urban Environments (STUE).

Antti Wallin, University Lecturer, Social Policy, Tampere University
Salla Jokela, University Lecturer, Sustainable Urban Development, Tampere University
Tuuli Hirvilammi, University Lecturer, Social Policy, Tampere University