Teaching sustainability: How to visualize and change CO2 emissions and corresponding habits?

Abstract

Teaching sustainability presents challenges due to the inherent complexity and required behavioral change. A special pedagogical approach is needed. In this paper, we focus on the research question how students' awareness of sustainability issues can be improved significantly in a brief workshop. The presented workshop let the students autonomously addressing problems and possible solutions in small groups – with no patented recipes given, nor any "finger-pointing" from the outside. The educational basis for this workshop is the concept of discovery learning in combination with sketchnoting. This is especially appropriate to present acquired knowledge in a compact and meaningful way, to show relationships and allow schemas to be developed by the participants. This paper also describes the workshop results from several executions and the lessons learned.