Pedagogic approaches are an important consideration in preparing students for dealing with sustainability and the handling of uncertainty, ambiguity, contestability, risk, change and complexity (Barnett and Hallam, 1999; Sterling, 2012). There is a growing consensus that traditional didactic pedagogic approaches are insufficient to equip graduates for these challenges and that instead students could be better prepared by pedagogic design which considers not only the cognitive but affective and behavioural dimensions of human response to sustainability. Research suggests these aims are better served by student-centred, active learning approaches that enable open-ended, participative, diverse and interactive learning experiences. Pedagogic approaches that have been identified as useful for this agenda include case studies, debates, stimulus activities, problem-based learning, critical reading and writing, fieldwork, role play and group discussion amongst others. Despite the body of work that has gone into identifying and experimenting with such pedagogies, there are a number of challenges to their take up in universities. Contemporary higher education is characterised by higher student numbers, increased workloads and higher expectations of academics against a backdrop of austerity all of which have consequences for how pedagogy is embedded into curriculum design – experimentation and risk taking can be effectively discouraged by the logistics of delivering the curriculum. However, if sustainability education is to be a serious agenda in higher education then academics would benefit from being encouraged to experiment with and embed such pedagogy for all students. This raises issues around how to scale up what are time and resource intensive pedagogies up so that all students participate and how to engage academics who may have no experience of these pedagogies to use them in their teaching. These issues are discussed in the context of UK higher education but may be relevant to other educational cultures.

Barnett, R. and Hallam, S. (1999) Teaching for supercomplexity: A pedagogy for higher education. In P. Mortimore (Ed.), Understanding pedagogy and its impact on learning. (pp. 137-155). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Sterling, S (2012) The Future Fit Framework – An introductory guide to teaching and learning for sustainability in HE, The Higher Education Academy.