As the forestry engineer Baba Dioum once said “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught”. Education, and academia, play a crucial role in shaping the minds of the future. Using the many resources made available by (not only) A4E members and with the strong conviction that, regardless of their field of study, students can make a change.

Laurane Fréour has been teaching an elective course named Sustainability in Academia at the University of Vienna for the past couple of years. The aim of the course is to understand the pivotal role that academia can play in addressing the climate and social crisis, and to actively develop solutions to improve sustainability at universities and in research. The course is divided in three blocs: sustainability in higher education, sustainability in research, and solutions to improve sustainability in academia.

The course is highly interactive, with methods commonly used in the Climate Fresk workshop, to actively engage students and switch from the classical passive teaching commonly used in STEMs disciplines, to active co-creation of the course and solution making. You can find a short article summarizing the pedagogical approach. All the slides of the course are publicly available to ease the incorporation of sustainability in astronomy courses.

For more reading on this topic, Chapter 5 of Laurane’s PhD thesis titled “Shifting narratives: from multiple stellar populations in globular clusters to sustainability” provides extensive details about the course and other information on sustainability in astrophysical research.

If you want to discuss more details, please, approach Laurane Fréour directly on slack.