Since we are at the level of mindset, action and values in the Prof E Sus project, rather than knowledge, we need to look for indicators of a sustainable mindset in our students (and colleagues and organisation otherwise there is no role model for the students in their everyday practice in the classroom/workplace).
How can we find evidence of what is going on in our students’ minds?
One idea was to predict what students might say through a sort of sustainability bingo. It turns out that the idea of bingo does not travel well across cultures. In addition it was incredibly hard to predict what students might say, write or do.
So a different idea would be instead to identify when an indicator of a sustainable mindset is observed it and amplify it by noticing it.
This would be kind of like the #Everyday sexism hashtag on Twitter where people post examples of when sexism occurs.
In our case we would post, not necessarily publicly but maybe in our reflection diaries or our students’ reports and feedback, whenever we noticed that a sustainable perspective had been taken.
The #everydaysustainability hashtag already exists and seems to be used for good technical ideas of sustainability. So maybe we need to invent a different hashtag name.
Any suggestions?
The important aspect of this is that we amplify the positive by actively noticing when something sustainable takes place.
We have recently learned that negative messages travel faster than positive ones. Therefore we need many more positive examples of sustainable practice in order to ensure that the world and our learners begin to look in a sustainable direction.
In the context of the Prof E Sus pilot course, we could replace Sustainability Bingo with an #everydaysustainabilty challenge to see how many examples our participants can come up with and review what they found for similarities, differences and depth of green.
