Starting with Learning Outcomes
When designing or revising a course, start by asking what you want students to walk away with. Vogel et al. (2023) identify three types of learning outcomes in EfS practice: knowledge, competencies and values. When these three align, students develop readiness to act - they don't just understand sustainability problems, they see themselves as capable of responding to them. Find out more on EfS Learning Outcomes here. No single teaching approach can address all learning outcomes. The key is to align them with those you want students to achieve.
What do we mean by 'teaching approach'?
Teaching approaches include the pedagogical theories, teaching practices, and learning activities you design for students (Vogel et al. 2023). Many approaches linked with Education for Sustainability (EfS) - like project-based learning, case studies, and partnerships with external organizations - are already established in higher education. These work particularly well for EfS because they bring together different disciplines and develop multiple competencies when students have time to reflect and apply what they're learning (Vogel et al. 2023).
Creating ‘brave spaces’ for EfS learning
While selecting teaching approaches, as an educator you also set the pace of the course, decide when to let students work independently through challenging topics and when to intervene, frame sustainability as relevant (or not) to your discipline, and create the classroom culture that allow students feeling safe questioning their assumptions.
Vogel et al. (2023) call this facilitating "brave spaces" - not safe spaces where everyone agrees, learning environments where students can confront uncomfortable ideas without shutting down. That balance - support plus intellectual challenge - is what allows transformation.
Creating and negotiating principled learning spaces is also essential to inclusive teaching practice. Visit the Eden Centre's Principled Learning Spaces page to explore practical strategies for creating non-judgmental, interactive environments and concrete practices for ground clearing, active listening, and open discussions.
Your choices about teaching methods shape what students gain from your course. But teaching methods are tools, not magic. They work when used intentionally, matched to clear learning outcomes, and embedded in a course structure that gives students time to practice, fail, reflect, and try again.
The sections and table below explore how different teaching approaches support knowledge, competencies, and values. Click on each section to learn more.
If your primary goal is knowledge transmission - helping students understand sustainability concepts, theoretical frameworks and/or interpret data and policies - you have several options.
In terms of teaching approaches, lectures remain the most widely used method and are effective for introducing key concepts, particularly in large cohorts. However, they are most impactful when designed to be interactive. You can invite guest experts from different fields, pause for discussion, use examples students recognise from their own lived experiences (Vogel et al. 2023). Fieldtrips and site visits can offer opportunities for more transformative knowledge experiences in ways lectures can't, particularly when you visit places students already know (Vogel et al. 2023).
In terms of frameworks for understanding sustainability, if it is conceptualised around three key pillars - environmental, economic, and social - you may want to guide students in examining how these dimensions interact with one another. You can encourage this by teaching students the difference between efficiency and sufficiency (Vogel et al. 2023 and Affolderback 2022). If efficiency focuses on questions such as, how do we do this with less, reflecting on sufficiency brings us to question: should we be doing this at all, and who decides? A sufficiency lens turns "how do we make air travel more efficient?" into "who gets to fly, how often, and why?" It's harder to teach because it requires students to also question assumptions rather than just think how to optimise systems. But it develops the kind of thinking - strategic, future-oriented, values-based - that sustainability work actually requires (Affolderback 2022).
If you want students to develop specific competencies – such as systems thinking, collaboration, anticipatory thinking, critical analysis - you might want to introduce teaching methods that create space to practice those skills.
Project-based learning and Problem-based learning are teaching methods in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time, and often in groups, to investigate and respond to complex question, problem, or challenges. Both methods help to develop systems thinking (seeing how things connect), anticipatory thinking (imagining possible futures), and integrated problem-solving (pulling together different types of knowledge) (Martínez Casanovas et al. 2022).
Other methods also help to develop specific competencies:
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Scenario planning (where students map out steps toward a specific future outcome), forecasting (projecting what's likely based on current trends), and back casting (working backward from a desired future) all develop anticipatory/future thinking competencies (Vogel et al. 2023).
- Games and simulations help to develop systems thinking by making feedback loops visible - students see how their decisions ripple through a system – but also integrated problem solving, as well as collaboration competencies and strategic action since these activities usually involve group-work (Vogel et al. 2023).
- Role play in case studies also encourages empathy and perspective-taking (normative competency and self-awareness) - particularly when students have to argue for positions they don't personally hold (Vogel et al. 2023).
As part of a large-scale study on EfS practices among educators in European higher education institutions, Lozano et al. (2019)13 surveyed 390 educators and analysed how 12 distinct teaching approaches relate to sustainability competencies, grouping these approaches into three main categories:
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Universal approaches - already common across higher education (lectures, case studies, project-based learning, mind maps, team teaching).
- Community and social justice approaches - developed specifically for working on justice issues with communities (community service learning, participatory action research, jigsaw groups where students teach each other),
- Environmental education approaches - emerging from environmental science traditions (eco-justice pedagogy, place-based education, life-cycle analysis, traditional ecological knowledge).
The study found that community service learning - where students work directly with local organisations on specific cases involving sustainability-related issues - particularly develops values such as empathy and competencies like strategic thinking. Students aren't just studying sustainability; they're working alongside people for whom these aren't abstract issues. Eco-justice and community approaches (from the environmental education category) developed the broadest range of competencies, but they require a significant shift. Instead of treating sustainability as a technical challenge, eco-justice pedagogy links environmental issues directly to power, racism, and economic structures (Lozano et al. 2019; Vogel et al. 2023).
But how can you bring students to re-examine their own values and see how values shape action is the most challenging?
Teaching approaches that support reflection can be useful to re-assess values and see how they can influence actions, but reflective moments need to be structured and repeated. Reflection opportunities in class or as part of written assignments can allow students to connect what they're learning to their own experience and identity. Real-world experiences or simulations are also very useful to stimulate further opportunities for reflection. Fieldwork (learning outside the classroom in real environments), partnerships with community organizations, and role play that allow students to inhabit different perspectives all create moments where students question their assumptions. (Vogel et al. 2023).
Table: EfS Teaching practices and illustrative examples applicable to develop key competencies for EfS – adapted from QAA/Advance HE's Education for Sustainable Development Guidance (2021)
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Practice and definition
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Illustrative examples
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Collaborative learning
A method of learning that is often self-organised and occurs outside of the formal learning environment. Collaborative learning takes place offline in small groups or online via social networks and collaboration tools. Needs are set by the group, not by an external goal; knowledge is co-constructed and can lead to creativity and open innovation (for example, crowdsourcing ideas through personal learning networks).
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An interdisciplinary, international project to create dementia-friendly communities;
Design projects around global challenges or the Sustainable Development Goals to encourage learning between disciplines and year groups, and with communities outside the institution.
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Enquiry-based learning
An approach based on self-directed enquiry or investigation in which the student is actively engaged in the process of enquiry facilitated by a teacher. Uses real-life scenarios; students investigate topics that foster skills of experimental design, data collection, critical analysis and problem solving.
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The Enhancing Fieldwork Learning project demonstrates using affordable, ubiquitous technologies (for example, tablets, digital cameras, apps) with social networks to enhance field learning for students at all stages.
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Play-based or playful learning (Games)
Structured or semi-structured approaches that let students explore approaches, scenarios, actions and consequences in a safe environment. Includes: Game-based learning (goal-oriented games with social components that mirror real-world experience); Gamification (using game mechanics in non-game contexts); Serious play (a playful mode open to emergent outcomes); Simulation (role plays, debates, mock trials, games that build professional behaviours).
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Phylo is an ecosystem building game where players try and build food chains to create a stable ecosystem while disrupting their opponents.
The Sustainable Strategies Game aims to stimulate collaborative engagement in business strategy making that promotes sustainability literacy skills, the adoption of sustainable practices, and the sustainable use of common resources. Ask students to adapt an existing game or create a new game that links their discipline to one or more of the UN SDGs.
The use of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® to co-create innovative solutions for clean energy incorporating technical, social business perspectives.
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Learning through storytelling
A process in which learning is structured around a narrative or story as a means of sense-making. It includes narrative pedagogy (sharing stories and interpreting experiences between students and teachers) and narrative-centred environments, which situate learners within a story-world (sometimes using virtual or augmented reality) in which they participate an unfolding story..
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Students can use digital storytelling to integrate ideas from across their studies and build their digital and professional identities.
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Problem-based learning
A style of active learning that uses real-world issues or problems to increase knowledge and understanding. Students work in small groups with facilitation; they decide what they know, what they need to learn, and then find and apply that knowledge. Suited to complex “wicked problems,” encouraging creativity, risk-taking and learning through failure.
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Engineering for People Design Challenge (Engineers Without Borders): an undergraduate design challenge exploring ethical, environmental, social and cultural aspects of engineering design.
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At LSE, Dr. Miqdad Asaria and students in HP437 - Health Equity, Climate Change and the Common Good use game design as a teaching method. Students create games that surface questions about climate and equity - who bears risks, who makes decisions, what counts as fair. Link to video.