“Students don’t need to be told we’re in a disaster”: academics’ experiences of teaching sustainability

Teaching academics operate in a turbulent context of natureculture challenges, as well as neoliberal institutional constraints. Therefore, understanding the experiences and observations of those teaching sustainability deserves ongoing attention. In an exploratory study, we conducted in-depth interviews at one Australian university with six academics who incorporate sustainability concepts into their teaching. In a move away from Cartesian separability we brought a relational and connected process philosophy to a qualitative interview methodology, enlivening interviews as performative “intra-views.” Applying a posthumanist sensibility to qualitative method opened the possibility of richer accounts of teaching experience. What emerged from the interviews was a sense of academics’ optimism, commitment and enthusiasm for teaching, along with their success strategies such as transdisciplinary pedagogies and crosssectorial partnerships. This research points to the importance of ongoing attention to the lived experience of academics teaching sustainability, and to the value of bringing theory to meet data in sustainability education research.