Co-Creating a Learning Community

Teaching Sustainability in Higher Education

Abstract

This study explores the emergence of a distinctive learning-community aspect of teaching sustainability. It uses action nets to describe major contributions shaping a learning community about sustainability. The results describe how the growing learning community of research, externally funded projects, teaching strategies, students, NGOs, and regional industry is framed within a sociotechnical network of actants and identifies events exposing the transitions in the making. Based on the findings, we discuss lessons learned from the co-creation, increasing the awareness of mechanisms involved in gaining (and regaining) support needed to create the new approach to teaching sustainability. The learning community mirrors, in many ways, the systemic nature of sustainability and sustainable development. It also introduces the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in the transitions. It was easier than anticipated to mobilize resources, but the connections between the different contributions are also delicate, and we experience the learning community as something like fresh produce—something we must create and recreate continuously.