This book is a comprehensive guide on how to teach sustainable consumption in higher education. Teaching and Learning Sustainable Consumption: A Guidebook systematizes the themes, objectives, and theories that characterize sustainable consumption as an educational field.
The first part of the book discusses approaches to teaching and learning sustainable consumption in higher education, including reflections on how learning occurs, to more practical considerations like how to set objectives or assess learning outcomes. The second part of the book is a dive into inspiring examples of what this looks like in a range of contexts and towards different aims – involving 57 diverse contributions by teachers and practitioners. Building on the momentum of a steady increase in courses addressing sustainable consumption over the past decade, this guidebook supports innovative approaches to teaching and learning, while also bringing to the fore conceptual debates around higher education and sustainability.
Overall, this book will be a seminal resource for educators teaching about sustainability and consumption. It will help them to navigate the specifics of sustainable consumption as a field of scholarship, and design their teaching approaches in a more informed, competent, and creative way.
Table of Contents:
PART I Design considerations for teaching and learning sustainable consumption
1 Sustainable consumption, a tricky topic to teach
Marlyne Sahakian, Jordan King, Jen Dyer, Daniel Fischer, and Gill Seyfang
2 Learning theories and pedagogies in teaching sustainable consumption
Daniel Fischer, Jordan King, Marlyne Sahakian, Jen Dyer, and Gill Seyfang
3 Learning objectives for teaching sustainable consumption
Jordan King, Daniel Fischer, Marlyne Sahakian, Jen Dyer, and Gill Seyfang
4 Assessing learning in teaching sustainable consumption
Jordan King, Daniel Fischer, Marlyne Sahakian, Jen Dyer, and Gill Seyfang
PART II Examples of teaching and learning sustainable consumption
Marlyne Sahakian, Jordan King, Jen Dyer, Daniel Fischer, and Gill Seyfang
5 The good life game: bargaining needs and resources
Lisa Hollands and Shirin Betzler
6 A letter to Aadya: uncovering social injustices in fast fashion
Samira Iran and Anja Lisa Hirscher
7 Clothing libraries: on-campus stores as real-world experiments for sustainable fashion
Samira Iran, Anja Lisa Hirscher, and Daniel Fischer
8 How to draw the economy? Putting care and nature back into economic models
Lucie Sovová
9 Powering practices: developing scenarios for energy futures
Tom Hargreaves
10 Speculative fiction for energy futures
Tom Hargreaves and Jos Smith
11 The story of your gadget
Gill Seyfang
12 From trash to treasure! Turning junk into Christmas-time gifts
I-Liang Wahn
13 Practice makes perfect! Exploring how practices cause consumption problems, and are also part of the solution
Marlyne Sahakian and Mallory Xinyu Zhan
14 A playful take on non-financial disclosure processes: speed dating with organizations and frameworks
Georgina Guillen-Hanson
15 Decarbonise! A playful pathfinding approach to a sustainable future
Veronika Kiss and Klára Hajdu
16 Let’s report a future practice: interview roleplay as a way to flesh out alternatives
Lenneke KuiJer
17 Company walk’n’talk: learning by sharing about corporate sustainability practices
Lisa Hollands and Shirin Betzler
18 Asking the (sustainable consumption) professionals!
Eva Heiskanen
19 The supermarket sweep: what do labels (not) tell us?
Gill Seyfang
20 To build or not to build? Roleplay for conflict management
Valerie Brachya
21 Theoretical theater: personifying theoretical ‘Characters’ to facilitate critical thinking
Gill Seyfang and Marlyne Sahakian
22 The change point toolkit for teaching: designing creative interventions
Alison L. Browne, Claire Hoolohan, Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs, and Liz Sharp
23 Consumption detectives: an imagination exercise
Shirin Betzler, Jessica Jung, Lisa Hollands, and Regina Kempen
24 Speak up! Debating critical voices
Shirin Betzler and Lisa Hollands
25 The clothesline for sustainability: can individual actions contribute to strong sustainable consumption?
Sylvia Lorek
26 Go Bananas! What everyday foods tell us about sustainability
Sally Russell
27 Creature of habit!
Cornelia Mayr
28 The power of one? Engaging students to reflect on individual agency to confront environmental issues
Emily Huddart Kennedy
29 Pizza policy misto: our perfect recipe for sustainable food consumption
Sylvia Lorek
30 Contemplating consumption: a meditation and mindfulness exercise
Manisha Anantharaman and Daniel Fischer
31 Walk’n’Write: ref lecting on efficiency, consistency, and sufficiency
Shirin Betzler and Lisa Hollands
32 It’s all about the message: promoting sustainability through communication design
Doreen Donovan
33 Second-hand clothing experienced first-hand: sustainable consumption through situated learning
Heike Derwanz
34 Dressed for sustainability success: a capsule wardrobe project
Iva Jestratijevic
35 Listen up! The role of podcasts for understanding environmental issues as a social construct
Juliet Fall and Karine Duplan
36 Create a website: a hands-on approach to communicate sustainable consumption
Karin Dobernig
37 Organizing for impact: strategic planning and community collaboration for social change towards sustainable consumption
Manisha Anantharaman and Suzanne Schmidt
38 Who knows where the money goes? Using a spending diary to reflect on consumption habits
Meredith Katz
39 Learning to change myself: personal approaches to sustainable consumption
Pascal Frank
40 Extracting sustainability: exposing the impacts from mining to supply the electronics industry
Robert Rattle
41 Capturing sustainable energy solutions on camera
Tom Hargreaves
42 Packed with sustainability!
Urška Vrabič-Brodnjak
43 Uncovering economies of sustainability: looking at alternatives to the status quo
Helen Holmes
44 Learning from the past? A socio-historical approach to food practices
Stefan Wahlen
45 Using zombies to communicate climate change!
Petra Bättig-Frey and Urs Müller
46 The 21-day sustainability challenge
Carmen Valor
47 Whodunnit? Role-playing to understand stakeholder perspectives through corporate scandals
Georgina Guillen-Hanson
48 Brave new world? Getting in a digitalized and globalized state of mind
Piergiorgio Degli Esposti
49 A change is gonna come: designing campus interventions to promote behavior change for sustainable consumption
Jordan King, Daniel Fischer, and Katja Brundiers
50 I can’t get no satisfaction: deliberating needs and satisfiers in sustainable consumption
Daniel Fischer, Jordan King, and Carlos R. Casanova
51 Business Origami! Piecing together product life cycles in the product-service system
Kersty Hobson
52 Covering one’s tracks: an ecological footprint game and debate
Karin Dobernig and Karl-Michael Brunner
53 Mobility, what opportunities for urban development and public policies?
Marlyne Sahakian
54 From field research to design fiction: from clarifying the present, to designing the future
Nicolas Nova
55 What we eat and why: narratives of food justice
Sunayana Ganguly and Shreelata Rao Sheshadri
56 How hard can it be to change practices?
Margit Keller and Triin Vihalemm
57 An intra-active exhibition on feminist theory
Tullia Jack
58 What I am wondering …: a teacher training program on how to find and answer questions of sustainable consumption
Antonietta Di Giulio
59 Feel and think! Teaching aspiring school teachers to teach slow fashion
Heike Derwanz
60 Future voyaging: the power of imagining the future today
Frederikke Oldin and Charlotte Louise Jensen
61 Don’t just learn the lesson, live the lesson: study abroad trips for collaborative and community-based sustainability
Ashley Colby
About the Author :
Daniel Fischer is Associate Professor for Consumer Communication and Sustainability at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. His research studies communication and learning interventions to advance more sustainable lifestyles. In his teaching, he strives to increase reflexivity in students to empower them to re-shape their relationships with the consumer societies into which they have been born, encultured, and socialized in.
Marlyne Sahakian is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Geneva. She teaches and does research on sustainable consumption in relation to food, energy, and wellbeing, and is a founding member of SCORAI Europe, a research network for sustainable consumption. She is the Director of a Master’s program called Sustainable Societies and Social Change, and strives to give students the critical and practical competencies for tackling sustainability problems.
Jordan King is a doctoral candidate in the School of Sustainability and College of Global Futures at Arizona State University. His work focuses on advancing innovations in cultivating and assessing the sustainability competencies of learners. In his teaching, he aims to motivate students to link inner transformations with systemic change for sustainable futures.
Jen Dyer is Associate Professor in Sustainability at the University of Leeds and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Jen enjoys using creative teaching methods to inspire and empower her students. Her research focuses on social inclusion and amplifying diverse voices around sustainability.
Gill Seyfang is Associate Professor of Sustainable Consumption in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, UK. She researches grassroots innovations for sustainable development and is a National Teaching Fellow (2017).
