Many institutions have been grappling with how to embed environment and sustainability learning into their teaching. Such initiatives often seem well suited to an interdisciplinary approach, but there is little open discussion of the challenges of working in this way, and what it might mean for nascent efforts to embed environmental education initiatives.
Funded by philanthropic donations, we recently established an environmental education team to consider how our institution might do this work, providing new routes for incoming and existing students to engage with environmental issues. Inspired by discussions with colleagues within our team, we explore here how the ease with which teaching staff can collaborate across disciplines might shape initiatives to deliver environmental education. An earlier version was presented at Advance HE’s 2025 Sustainability Symposium.
Barriers to collaboration
Interdisciplinary collaboration requires us to overcome assumptions about how knowledge is produced and navigate new norms and expectations. Colleagues can have very different views about what interdisciplinary collaboration looks like, from the subordination-service mode – in which supplementary disciplines are engaged to complement a primary discipline – to the integrative-synthesis mode – a more balanced merger of expertise from different fields – and last, the agonistic-antagonistic mode, in which interdisciplinarity comes from challenging the boundaries of established disciplines, leaning in to “difficult decisions”.
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And with about 25 per cent of UK universities currently or recently restructuring, higher education is already dealing with change and uncertainty in how we work. Practical things such as timetabling interdependencies and differences in teaching practices between departments may add complexity and scupper attempts to collaborate. They require adjustments that will change not only student experiences, but the already heavy workloads of faculty and administrative staff.
Five Cs for eco education collaboration
Left unaddressed, these barriers to collaboration may result in institutions accomplishing their environmental education goals in other ways, some more effective than others (see Figure 1).
Cosmetic: Involves the outward appearance of embedding environmental education, without effective implementation. We can see examples in the corporate world of businesses aligning their activities to specific United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, but in ways that undermined others. Theoretically, SDGs could be similarly used to badge modules and courses, even if the content neglects certain pillars of sustainability.
Cursory: An initiative where the environmental content is bolted on to what students already do – such as using an environmental issue as an isolated case study in a course, treating the environment as an object of temporary interest. A single environment module that all students take might also fall in this space, if there are no subsequent opportunities for deeper application of knowledge acquired. These initiatives might also be described as tick-box or “compliance” moves.
Importantly, neither of these require staff working together.
Coalition: Involves staff coming together towards a common goal but working independently to deliver it. Our Environmental Studies Minor would be an example of this – we’ve made modules on environmental topics available to students on non-environmental courses as a pathway to a minor award, but each staff member still develops and delivers material independently.
Co-ordination: Involves a greater level of communication between the team, each developing and delivering their own contribution, but now with the knowledge of what others participating in the initiative are doing. This could be a cross-faculty programme delivered by teaching staff from more than one discipline, each teaching on their area of expertise, but mindful of how the pieces fit together to form a coherent whole.
Collaboration: Involves a team co-delivering an environmental education initiative together, such as cross-faculty, team-taught modules.
Cultivating collaboration
Institutional culture can block interdisciplinary collaboration, by appearing to reward pure disciplinary focus, according to research.
This prompts us to ask how else institutional cultures can disincentivise collaboration? For example, could overemphasis on student evaluations in staff appraisals limit appetite for innovative, interdisciplinary teaching, prioritising traditional or “safe” approaches? What can institutional culture do to recognise and reward collaboration?
The same study also notes the importance of critical corridor talk as a space for staff to meet across disciplines informally, and organically build awareness of each other’s ways of working, to find and create the points of intersection. How can academic spaces, both physical and virtual, promote this more?
To collaborate on environmental education necessitates creating environments of collaboration. Our taxonomy acknowledges that action on environmental education may take different forms as institutional culture and supportive structures for doing this work are developed, and provides a roadmap towards what could be accomplished in this space.
Aideen Foley is a reader in environment and society within the School of Social Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London. She is also an academic co-director of Environmental Education Projects since mid-2023.
Dale Mineshima-Lowe is an assistant professor teaching political science with Parami University (Myanmar) and a visiting lecturer teaching climate and environmental hazards with Birkbeck, University of London.
Acknowledgement: Thanks to Joanne Leal, Stephen Willey, Kayleigh Woods Harley and Lucy Ukoumunne, whose discussions contributed to this article.
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