May 13, 2025, by sustainablenottingham

Sustainability in the classroom: A toolkit for embedding sustainability in teaching and learning

Christopher Ives, Associate Professor, School of Geography

Over the past few years I’ve had countless conversations with colleagues about sustainability. Many people are concerned about increasingly acute global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, socio-economic inequalities, and pressures on health and wellbeing in our towns and cities. Yet often they are unsure about how these intersect with the topics they focus on in their classrooms. Others have relayed the passion many students have for sustainability or students’ understandable anxieties related to possible destabilisation of the earth’s life support systems. Others are aware that the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) are central to the university’s mission but feel overwhelmed by the prospect of adding more boxes to tick alongside their already full teaching workloads. It was in these contexts that a team of us undertook a project to explore how sustainability could become more central to teaching and learning here at UoN, and how as a community we could accelerate and amplify best practice that already exists across our UK campuses.

The toolkit on Sharepoint

One of the key outputs from the project was the Education for Sustainable Development Staff Toolkit. This toolkit is a freely-accessible resource for UoN colleagues and has been designed for people involved in teaching at all levels and across all Schools and Faculties to understand the fundamentals of sustainability and to explore how to embed this into their own teaching practice. It approaches sustainability not in a prescriptive way, but instead allows freedom for users to interact with themes, concepts, methods and approaches in ways that are authentic to their own pedagogical strengths and interests. It’s also a space to share experiences and ideas with the wider university community.

The first section of the toolkit introduces the concept of “Education for Sustainable Development” (ESD). While there are different terms and definitions, UNESCO characterises ESD as giving learners of all ages the “knowledge, skills, values and agency to address interconnected global challenges including climate change, loss of biodiversity, unsustainable use of resources, and inequality”. While the 17 SDG’s can be considered the desired outcomes we are collectively aiming for, ESD focuses on how we can develop the competencies required to get there. These competencies cover multiple domains of knowledge, skills, values and action and are relevant to all different disciplines.

Resources within the toolkit

The toolkit also provides links to resources that are useful for educators thinking about how to embed ESD within their teaching practice.

One particularly useful resource is the guidance developed by Advance HE and QAA, which covers how to translate sustainability competencies (such as critical thinking, collaboration, problem solving and self-awareness) into course and module learning outcomes. Links to relevant subject benchmarks are also included, to help module and programme-leaders to connect sustainability to the focal areas of their disciplines.

How to start embedding ESD

Another section of the toolkit provides a step-by-step guide to help educators think about key elements of designing and embedding ESD within their practice. This guide has been developed while fully acknowledging the barriers that often exist such as a lack of time and resources, or an already crowded curriculum.

1. The first step is to find like-minded people! To help with this, we have established a ‘community of practice’, which can be joined by anyone who is interested.
2. The second step is to understand and map what your current teaching practice already supports in terms of sustainability.
3. The third step is to think about your graduates and what kinds of knowledge, skills and competencies they need to take with them into their future endeavours.
4. The fourth step is to consider your learning environment and explore the best contexts for developing these skills. It could, for example, include using the campus as an outdoor classroom or developing new community-based learning experiences.
5. Fifth, consider the kinds of pedagogies (teaching philosophies) that cultivate the knowledge, skills and competencies. It could include less traditional approaches such as problem-based learning, role play, reflection or debate.
6. The sixth step is to design assessment tasks that are meaningful and resonate with relevant ESD frameworks.
7. The final step is to take action! It’s best to begin somewhere and experiment with changes that are achievable. Learning from these and sharing insights with others is vital to moving towards having sustainability infused in teaching across the University.

Best practice case studies

Finally, the toolkit offers a growing repository of ‘best practice’ from across the University. There is already much going on across the university in the field of sustainable education and it’s important that we can learn from and be inspired by our colleagues from across all campuses. If you have experimented with embedding sustainability into your teaching or working with a pedagogical approach to develop key skills and competencies, you can submit a short ‘case study’, which will be made available to others. There is also a compilation of helpful tools and resources that can be used when designing teaching for sustainability.

This toolkit is just one step towards embedding sustainability in Nottingham’s culture of teaching and learning. With sustainability embedded into the university’s goals it is important that education is recognised as a core pillar alongside our research activities and management of our estate and operations. At an increasingly turbulent and dynamic time both within the UK and globally, it is vital to ensure we are equipping our graduates with the qualities they need to help create a flourishing and resilient future for both people and the planet.

The toolkit can be found here – UoN logon needed.

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