Educating for sustainability as the antidote to global crises: it’s more important and easier than you might think

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Date
2025-10-13
Authors
Sheehan, Madoc
Nesbit, Susan
Byrne, Edmond
Kunz, Nadja C.
Conrad, Steven
O'Brien, Katherine R.
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Taylor & Francis Group
Published Version
10.1080/00139157.2025.2548767
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Abstract
STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates are well placed to become the sustainability champions and pra­ctitioners the world urgently needs, if their educators burnish them with the sustainability-aligned knowledge, tools, and skills necessary for them to achieve their full potential. There are simple and effective ways educators can enhance their teaching and start the journey toward creating graduates with sustainability-aligned competencies. Com­plexity knowledge, innovative decision-making, creativity, critical thinking, ethics and values, systems thinking, and tran­s­disciplinary teamwork are all imp­or­tant characteristics of an undergraduate sustainability in STEM education. Simply put, these skills make our STEM graduates more employable. Horizontal and vertical integration of sustainability competencies into university STEM education is widely recognized as the most effective approach, but requires educators to overcome commonly per­ceived barriers to teaching sustai­nability. Here we offer practical steps and useful resources to overcome these barriers, and enable educators to embed sustainability in their own STEM courses, degree pro­grams, and teaching practice .
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Keywords
Sustainability Institute , SDG 4 - Quality Education , STEM graduates , Sustainability champions and pra­ctitioners , STEM education , [EngineeringArchitecture]
Citation
Sheehan, M., Nesbit, S., Byrne, E., Kunz, N. C., Conrad, S. and O'Brien, K. R. (2025) 'Educating for sustainability as the antidote to global crises: it’s more important and easier than you might think', Environment, 67(6), pp. 39-47. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2548767
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https://hdl.handle.net/10468/18550
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School of Engineering and Architecture
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© 2025, The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.