King's College London

As the projects awarded in the inaugural round of the Education for Sustainability Projects Fund near completion, we’ve checked in with the academics involved to ask: what the experience has been like? How has the project helped embed sustainability across curricula, faculties and educational opportunities at King’s? And what have the key learnings been?

What is Education for Sustainability?

Education for Sustainability (EfS) – also known as Education for Sustainable Development – is a transformative approach to education, which seeks to imbue learners with the knowledge, skills and competencies to approach complex real-world sustainability challenges, create change and ensure no one is left behind.  

In Autumn 2023, 12 interdisciplinary projects from teams encompassing a wide range of faculties were awarded funding for their projects by King’s Academy and King’s Climate & Sustainability to support this approach. All of the projects sought to find different, innovative pathways to the same destination: embedding climate and sustainability within students’ experiences and learning at King’s.

While the fund is intended as a starting point to enable long-term transformation plans that will continue to develop beyond the funding period, many of the initial projects are approaching completion – and several key learnings, successes and challenges have already arisen.

Challenging the boundaries of sustainability in education

EfS seeks to enable students to apply their learning to real-world sustainability challenges. One of the key successes of the funding has been to allow academics to test out non-traditional methods to explore these approaches. Feedback from awarded winners has often focused on the success of gamification for highlighting a range of perspectives and challenges.

For example, Dr Helen Coulshed, Senior Lecturer in Chemical Education, noted that “Being part of an interdisciplinary EfS project has been an excellent opportunity to work with staff and students from across King’s who are interested in using gamification of learning as a means of embedding sustainability into their courses. I particularly valued working with our student researchers to co-create bespoke chemistry cards for the dilemma EfS boardgame. This enabled me to choose topics that fall outside the curriculum but are complimentary to their course and relevant to their lived experiences and the world around us.”

Similarly, Dr Kosha Mehta, Senior Lecturer in Bioscience Education, said that “The EfS project facilitated teaching of sustainability to students via a board game. Also, it allowed to assess students’ responses on game-based learning.” She also added that this approach “offered advantages like promoting peer-to-peer interactions, helping students understand others’ perspectives, and fostering solution-focussed discussions on critical issues.”

It is clear from these projects, too, that framing conversations on sustainability around students’ own world views and values has been hugely successful. Dr Coulshed went on to say that “Making time in chemistry students’ busy timetable to discuss sustainability in the context of their degree was invaluable. It was excellent to see how much students enjoyed playing the game and debating topics that linked to their personal values, how they can positively impact society and the world.”

The funds also allowed department and programme teams the space and resources to lay the foundations necessary to build EfS from the ground up.

Dr Clara Lopez Rodriguez and Professor Megan Bowman of the Dickson Poon School of Law noted that “The King’s Academy EfS grant enabled us to undertake important groundwork in the Law School through a mapping report and an expert roundtable, which helped us to understand where we are now, and where we could take this in future.”

They went on to highlight that the fund helped to foster collaboration across faculties and institutions, explaining that “...the roundtable was amongst the first of its kind for law schools, and brought together colleagues from diverse disciplines at King’s (such as Dentistry, Engineering, and Business) and also from some other law schools in the UK (Durham and Dundee) to provide invaluable insights about ways of thinking and doing EfS. Apart from building a community of practice in this field, those discussions are helping us to create some scenarios for discussion within our Law School about potential ways forward. In short, this funding gave us the opportunity to kickstart a conversation about how we can best structure our educational offerings to show leadership at this crucial moment in time.”

‘A crucial foundation for further progress’

Simal Efsane Erdogan, PhD Candidate in the Dickson Poon School of Law, summed up her project by saying “My involvement with the project as a research assistant allowed me to deeply engage with the intersection of sustainability and legal education. Through this experience, I observed that inclusion of sustainability-related material in core curricula is now essential. I believe law schools, perhaps more than other disciplines, should lead the way in educating all stakeholders about climate change and broader sustainability issues, given that law touches upon so many aspects of everyday life, creating new opportunities, and potentially addressing key challenges. In this regard, I see this project as laying a crucial foundation for further progress.”

Similarly, Emma Lowe, PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, reflected that: “As a Research and Teaching Assistant on the Education for Sustainability project, I have learnt that sustainability can be taught within any academic discipline, as challenging as this may seem! If it is highlighted how and when sustainable choices can be made, making these choices becomes easier. One of my favourite tasks on the project consisted of exploring different subject areas, and working out how to explain the sustainability issues underlying them. I am very hopeful about the impact of the Education for Sustainability project across King’s, and look forward to the day when all disciplines include some degree of sustainability education.”

While their words reflect the results within their projects, the sentiment could be applied to any of the other initiatives the inaugural round of funding has supported.

The ultimate successes of EfS projects won’t be felt until well into the future, when today’s students become tomorrow’s educators, policymakers, doctors, creatives and many of the other vital professions that are needed to ensure a sustainable future for all. However, the successes and learnings identified across the 12 funded projects from 2023’s inaugural EfS Projects Fund clearly demonstrate important wins in embedding sustainability – not just into our education, but into every aspect of our society and beyond.

The second round of EfS Projects funding is currently open for applications: read more about the fund and apply by 17:00 on 8 November 2024 [internal only].