They share the mission

Anne-Kathrin Peters and Cecilia Enberg. (The image is a montage)

- We had never met before, but I immediately realised during the interview that Anne was incredibly talented and that our fields complement each other, says Cecilia Enberg, who works as a pedagogical developer with a special focus on learning for sustainable development at Linköping University.

Anne's name is Anne-Kathrin Peters, but she goes by Anne, and she is an associate professor of technology education with a focus on sustainability at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
- I realised early on that I didn't want to take on this assignment on my own. It's so valuable to have someone to talk to. During the interview, I googled Cecilia to find out more about who she was, Anne adds.
Both Anne and Cecilia were keen to share the leadership with someone else and think that shared leadership has many advantages.

On 4 December, they held a digital start-up meeting to which they had invited the other 15 people who applied for the position of focus group leader, to hear their thoughts on what the focus group should focus on during the two years of the assignment
- Other interested parties were of course also welcome to participate. Then we will start the work in earnest after the turn of the year.

Contributing to change

- I've been longing to do something meaningful that contributes to change and this can enable a big change that we need in our education programmes, says Anne.
- Yes, it is an extremely important issue. Sustainability needs to permeate all programmes. I realise that it is difficult. We are in a system with structures and processes about what is important and what is good and they contribute to the difficulties of addressing learning for sustainable development in a substantive way, adds Cecilia.
She argues that the word development is problematic because we often link development to constant economic growth.
- That is, the very development that causes us to have the sustainability problems we have today.
Anne nods in agreement:
- We live in a fundamentally unsustainable system. We need openness, creativity and a willingness to work for new ways of living, which includes new ways of learning and teaching.

Reduced empathy

They agree that education is very important to bring about change.
- For example, research shows that students’ empathy tends to decrease during their studies,’ says Cecilia. And it's exactly things like empathy that we need to be able to deal with sustainability challenges in a wise way.
- Yes, the same is true in IT. We lose the diversity that the students bring with them when they become uniform, that is, socialised to only care about technology. During education, we have many opportunities to talk about how we want to live. Students and young people are an important part of the transformation of society. Education must give them space to care about the world and opportunities to act for a better world, not just learn to make a difference at some point in the future. The transformation is needed now and students must be able to be part of it.

Emotions and dreams

- Something happens when we start to make room for emotions and dreams, when we empathise and understand other people's perspectives, says Cecilia. If instead of giving students the task of designing a product and calculating its energy consumption, we start by asking them to think about and discuss what a sustainable future could look like, what their dream and vision looks like. Then they can take these ideas into account when designing the product.

They recognise that it's not an easy task ahead of them, but they really shine when they describe what society as a whole can gain from including the whole person and building relationships.

Anna-Karin Johnson