Over the past decade, my research has mainly focused on sustainability education, particularly within higher education and teacher education. As a Lecturer in Education at the University of Dundee, I teach across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules, where I use sustainability education as an underlying philosophical framework. In line with this approach, I encourage critical dialogue, collaborative reflection and engagement with interconnected, complex social, economic and environmental challenges. My research also investigates the opportunities and challenges associated with enacting sustainability education through curriculum and pedagogy. In my theoretical work, I have engaged with a range of themes related to sustainability education including , including its conceptualisation, sustainability competencies, systems thinking and approaches to assessment for sustainability learning. Looking back across this work, I find myself asking a simple question: How has my understanding of sustainability education changed over time?
For many years, I approached sustainability education largely through a psychological lens. Like many researchers and educators in the field, I was interested in how educational experiences might influence learners’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviours in relation to sustainability. There is undoubtedly value in this work as education can play an important role in helping people understand sustainability challenges and develop commitments to more sustainable futures.
However, over the years, I have begun to question whether this focus captures the full complexity of the environmental, social and economic challenges we face. What strikes me now is how often sustainability problems are framed as problems of individual behaviour. The underlying assumption is that if people know more, care more or develop the right attitudes, they will act differently. While this assumption is rarely stated explicitly, it continues to influence much educational research, policy and practice.
A number of questions continue to emerge from my research and teaching practice: Is sustainability practice simply about planting trees, reducing waste and consuming less? Or does it also involve questioning forms of inequality, exclusion and exploitation that make some lives more vulnerable than others? Does sustainability require us to examine whose voices are heard, whose knowledge counts and who bears the social and environmental costs of current ways of living? Is sustainability about rethinking our relationships with other humans and the more-than-humans?
These questions have led me to understand environmental challenges as questions of ethics, history, power and justice. They invite us to think about how humans relate to one another and to the more-than-human world. These questions are shaping my current work. Rather than asking how education can persuade people to adopt sustainable behaviours, I am becoming more interested in how education can support people to question assumptions, recognise injustice, reflect critically on dominant ways of thinking and imagine alternative futures. Such education would still value sustainability knowledge, attitudes and behaviours but it would also develop the capacity to examine complex social, political and cultural conditions that shape how environmental problems are understood and responded to.
I do not see this shift in emphasis as a rejection of my earlier work. Rather, it reflects an expansion in my understanding of sustainability education. The challenge is no longer simply how to help individuals become more sustainable. It is how education might create opportunities for people to rethink their relationships with one another and with the more-than-human world to create more just present and futures.
For this, I believe that sustainability education needs to be transdisciplinary. It is not simply about introducing topics such as climate change, human rights, peace, inclusion or equality into the curriculum of various disciplines. These themes are important, but sustainability education also requires critical learning processes such as, critical dialogue, critical engagement with learning materials, questioning authors’ assumptions, collective action for justice and raising awareness and voice on issues such as climate change and extreme weather events through social media or conversations in community and digital spaces. These processes can be included in all disciplines.
For me, sustainability education is becoming less about changing behaviour and more about creating spaces where people can question assumptions, engage with questions of justice and rethink their relationships with the human and more-than-human world.
Dr Qudsia Kalsoom is Lecturer in Education at the University of Dundee, UK. Her research explores sustainability education, transformative learning and questions of social and environmental justice. She is particularly interested in how educational practices can help learners critically engage with sustainability challenges through individual and collective agency.
