Pedagogy and Sustainability Coffee Morning – Eager Beginnings
Co-organised by Dr Treasa De Loughry (Cultural Imaginaries of Just Transitions) and Dr Aparajita Banerjee (Just Transitions Research Group) – April 13th 2023
By Caleb O’Connor
Eager, in its confusion of excitement and uncertainty, is the perfect word to describe the tone of the Sustainability and Pedagogy Coffee Morning. Academics from across the disciplines, including literature , engineering, architecture, science, business, sociology, and social policy, shared a space to discuss the limits and opportunities of interdisciplinary and environment-focused teaching. Quite the task, made possible by the wonderfully composed Treasa De Loughry and Aparajita Banerjee who facilitated a generative discussion.
By piecing together experiences and concerns from different schools, the landscape of UCD’s environmental and sustainable teaching methods became clearer, as points of interest in both teaching and assessment methods shaped our discussion. It was understood that interdisciplinarity is a generative, if often relatively untheorized pedagogical practice and approach, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level because students require additional scaffolding, supports, and modelling, to do interdisciplinarity work.
This was expressed early on by multiple colleagues, who observed that while students are happy to learn from other disciplines and will eagerly engage in classes that move beyond their discipline, when it comes to assessment, they don’t want to take risks when it matters to grades. Interestingly, multiple colleagues use pass/ fail grades to encourage students to take creative risks when it comes to modules teaching topics like climate change which are complex, multi-disciplinary, in-process, and require creative problem solving. Currently, the environment is only a minor element in most Arts and Humanities students’ coursework, and so the shared language of eco-criticism, which can aid interdisciplinary research across disciplines, can be obscured.
Additional discussions revolved around developing shared conversations around pedagogy and the environment, encouraging cross-college teaching, and working on shared resources. Future topics for discussion may include tackling student experiences of eco-anxiety and eco-grief which can pervade classroom conversations about biodiversity loss, climate change, and/ or environmental harm.
By the end of our discussion, the anxiety of leaving our disciplines and openly discussing the limits of previous experiences with interdisciplinary teaching had been alleviated. There was a sense that we were all on the same page, and keen to continue a collaborative discussion on teaching environmental challenges at UCD. Eagerness had distilled into its purest form, and we were excited to move forward and find new ways of developing pedagogies that would make environmental, sustainable, and transitionary learning effective across schools and disciplines.