Teaching and Learning Sustainable Consumption: A Guidebook

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.

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).