Recommendations

Adopt holistic and innovative teaching/learning approaches

• Make sure to explore where the students are in terms of sustainability. What are their background knowledge, expectations, understandings of the relevance of the concept to their field of study and/or profession. In what ways is sustainability meaningful to them? And where and in what ways does it clash?
• Take a holistic perspective on learning: involve cognitive as well as emotional and bodily dimensions and integrate working with values, attitudes, knowledge and skills in your teaching, i.e. try to make visible the links between content knowledge and every-day-choices.
• Incorporate arts-based teaching/learning methods and nature-based approaches. This requires slowing down. Despite often having a packed curriculum, it is essential to make time for reflections and aesthetic practices that are fundamental to transformational learning.
• Encourage exploration and experiments with the absence of “right and wrong”. Recognising mistakes as places for new discoveries, you can actively use them as pedagogical opportunities to develop courage and action competence. Sustainable transition is a learning process in itself, and an important competence is to be a courageous learner.
• This also frees the teacher from the weight of being “the expert”, as we are all in a continuous learning process together. Consider how you can move from the traditionally all-knowing figure to a co-learning facilitator

Integrate a sustainability aspect into all your courses/study programs

• Make sure to explore where the students are in terms of sustainability. What are their background knowledge, expectations, understandings of the relevance of the concept to their field of study and/or profession. In what ways is sustainability meaningful to them? And where and in what ways does it clash?
• Take a holistic perspective on learning: involve cognitive as well as emotional and bodily dimensions and integrate working with values, attitudes, knowledge and skills in your teaching, i.e. try to make visible the links between content knowledge and every-day-choices.
• Incorporate arts-based teaching/learning methods and nature-based approaches. This requires slowing down. Despite often having a packed curriculum, it is essential to make time for reflections and aesthetic practices that are fundamental to transformational learning.
• Encourage exploration and experiments with the absence of “right and wrong”. Recognising mistakes as places for new discoveries, you can actively use them as pedagogical opportunities to develop courage and action competence. Sustainable transition is a learning process in itself, and an important competence is to be a courageous learner.
• This also frees the teacher from the weight of being “the expert”, as we are all in a continuous learning process together. Consider how you can move from the traditionally all-knowing figure to a co-learning facilitator

Find your tribe and help create supportive communities

• Connect with like-minded colleagues, inside or outside your institution, teachers and staff, to share your experiences, dilemmas, resources and to co-create courses, activities and transformative approaches to teaching/learning.
• Find out what supports your own resources in terms of hope, action competence, resilience and engagement with sustainability issues, e.g. using the Inner Development Goals.
• Connect with colleagues to motivate your organisations to provide space and time for pedagogical innovations, as well as continuous professional development, both practice-based and research-based.
• Connect with existing communities for Education for Sustainable Development to share experiences, collaborate and co-develop new approaches to sustainability teaching/learning. E.g., NLL (Nordic Network for Lifelong Learning) and The global RCE-network are good places to start.