The Wiley Handbook of Sustainability in Higher Education Learning and Teaching

The areas discussed here are all important areas of development of change agency. However, if such functions are carried out on behalf of and in isolation from students, then the opportunity for students to develop these change agency attributes becomes limited. Nor will learning about these processes of change consciously occur without reflection. Therefore, we suggest ensuring that students are included in these processes, treated as partners, and included in communication, and reflective discussions are facilitated, which might incorporate the role of more “academically neutral” university support.

The promotion of activist learning holds potential risk for academic staff (Ludlow 2010; Williford 2015), although this risk will in part be related to their standing and institutional capital (Ludlow 2010). The willingness to take such risks can relate to staff identities as professional activists (Costa et al. 2021a,b), also referred to as scholar‐activists (Williford 2015). Although many ESD educators and practitioners might not see themselves as activists, many could be described as such, based on activist characteristics of knowing that they cannot take a neutral position, the desire to change the world (Ollis 2008), and the championing and challenging for systemic change (Costa et al. 2021a). By encouraging activist learning for students, work itself becomes a place of activism for the educator and practitioner. Bubriski and Semaan (2009: 96) encourage the educator to push students to “come out of their comfort zone – to try something new and potentially scary”; maybe we as educators should also be challenging ourselves in the same way.

The SSH project is student‐led, aligned to the formal curriculum, and aims to enact social change through providing opportunities for exploration of sustainable living for future students, inspiring and informing a wider student body about sustainable living, developing change agency skills, and changing habits and behaviors of the students residing in the SSH itself. We therefore feel this project deserves the moniker of “activist learning.”

As with most activism‐oriented educational projects, the SSH project is limited in its lack of longitudinal evaluation of the impacts of such an approach. Such evaluation across a range of timescales is needed to help us understand what makes quality, not just any, activist learning.

In Table 2.3we provide a series of recommendations that can be used to support activist learning across the formal, non‐formal/informal, and hidden curriculum.

Table 2.3 Recommendations to support activist learning.

As an ESD practitioner it is all too easy to uncritically extol the virtues of activist learning projects, and the role of such activist learning projects in the informal curriculum for the potential development of a wide range of sustainability competencies. Yet, our reflections uncover questions about the limitations within the informal curriculum, including whether the informal curriculum alone can deliver the learning potential the projects are capable of, without at least some informal structure for guided reflection and discussion. Yet, imposing a structure for reflection detracts from genuine student‐ownership of projects, and might not be possible in genuinely student‐led activity.

We might then look to the formal curriculum to deliver the potential of activist learning. The formal curriculum might allow us space for student‐initiated activist projects and opportunities to structure assessment around a set of sustainability competencies, allowing deeper reflection and development of these competencies (see Robinson and Molthan‐Hill 2021), and space for critical discussion and debate around deeper, systemic issues. Publicly declaring an activist agenda in learning and assessment design is itself controversial, with the risk of accusations of promulgating a particular political agenda or being at odds with other educational priorities and agendas. Yet activist learning projects can deliver to many different educational agendas from employability, student experience, and students as partners. It is also difficult in the formal curriculum to genuinely provide the space for mistakes and failure. Activism projects can also come with serious challenges from burnout to conflict, and the formal curriculum does not allow students to walk away from projects which are no longer working for them.