Environmental Education and Learning for Sustainability

Education and learning, citizen participation, and whole system innovations are increasingly recognized as essential avenues for strengthening people's environmental and sustainability interests, concerns, and capacities. They also play a vital role in enhancing the abilities of individuals, organizations, and wider systems to navigate transitions toward more sustainable ways of living and cultivating ecological mindfulness. This course encourages students to engage critically with approaches of environmental and sustainability education and designs of educational programs or activities, drawing on a wide spectrum of learning approaches and forms of community engagement. Rather than limiting sustainability education to the transmission of information or purely rational argumentation, the course emphasizes the importance of values, relationality, embodied and arts-based forms of learning that support lived and context-sensitive ways forward. Attention is also given to perspectives that foreground the more-than-human world and invite learners to question established assumptions, boundaries, and norms in light of complex sustainability challenges.

A central point of departure is the emancipatory capacity-building perspective on education, placed in dialogue with more instrumental, behavior change-oriented approaches. Students explore the emancipatory lens through multiple viewpoints---examining diverse ways of knowing, alternative learning traditions, and transformative practices that address the intricate social, ecological, and ethical dimensions of sustainability. Examples from a range of contexts illustrate how such varied approaches can inform whole system re-design and collective action. Throughout the course, students analyze how emancipatory and instrumental perspectives intersect, diverge, or complement each other, and consider the implications of these dynamics for effective sustainability education.

This course has a FYOD policy: Forget Your Own Device. Within the sessions we work as much as possible without digital devices, while the use of human intelligence is encouraged over the use of artificial intelligence.

This course is part of a two-tier course combination: ELS31806 and ELS32806. If you are interested in either course, we recommend reviewing both descriptions to make the most fitting choice. Although the courses can be taken independently, we recommend taking both as they build upon each other. Where the first course, ELS31806, focuses more on understanding and hands-on experiencing foundations and design principles of sustainability education, the second course, ELS32806, emphasizes applying these principles through the design of a concrete sustainability education initiative and facilitation of a learning activity. Both cour...

• Understand the role of education and learning in sustainability transitions, in stimulating awareness, understanding and action, in change of lifestyle, and in strengthening human-nature connections

• Identify different orientations and forms forms of education and learning that can contribute to regenerating, re-imagining and sustaining healthy and equitable (human and more-than-human) relationships, ways of living and communities

• Develop and critique educational strategies and related learning-based activities related to sustainability challenges

• Reflect on the main take-aways from the literature and the lectures and how they inform one's understanding of and position in education and learning for sustainability

• Reflect on and express how the course as a whole has affected or changed one's own feelings, basic assumptions or perspectives related to sustainability, education and their own self-world relationship

• Actively engage oneself and peers in sustainability educational issues and hands-on activities

• ? (60%) The quality of the students' group work and design-case report.
• ? (40%) Reflective product (video, essay) on educational perspectives introduced in the course.
• ? (0%) Personal reflection in word, visually, spoken text or a combination.
• ? (0%) Active participation and able to engage others in the student-led activities, workshops excursions and interactive lecture sessions.
• ? (%) Attendance is mandatory due to the course principle of learning by participation.

Master students with at least some background in social sciences (e.g. in education, communication, sociology, philosophy or psychology) and experience in interdisciplinary team work can join this course.

• Literature will be provided via Brightspace.