On finding the balance between imparting despair and hope

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The results of "freak" flash floods in Valencia at the end of October last year.

All in all I'm very happy about my course DM2573 "Sustainability and Media Technology". It could equally well have been called "Sustainability and Computing", but since it's a compulsory course in the Media Technology engineering programme, it's has the name it has. It's also my main teaching commitment every year, and the number of students taking the course has risen over time; last year (Nov-Dec) 135 students took the course - up from 110 the year before. Also, the course has been taught every year since 2012. And while the course evolves and changes every year, it hasn't changed fast enough to keep up with the pace of change in the world and in the student population.

We have a concluding panel debate in the course every year where five invited guests discuss "Images of the future" (e.g. anything and everything sustainability). Some years ago a student asked a difficult question; "knowing what you know, how do you get up in the morning?" and one of the panelist answered:

”I have little hope we can fix the problems, but I still wake up every day and act as if we can change the world. And who knows, perhaps we really can change the world if enough people act this way?” 

I immedately noted down this quote and have it on a slide that I show the students every year. And I love the answer because it starts by establishing a low point ("there is no hope") but opens up to the possibility that there might, in fact, be hope ("perhaps we can change the world [if we work hard together]"). 

So when we started to give the course in 2012, we felt we needed to shake the students up. We were afraid there would be one or more climate deniers (or climate sceptics) in the classroom who would derail the course, and we didn't want to get embroiled in endless discussions about whether climate change was real, whether it was anthropogenic (man-made) or whether it was serious. So our strategy was to hit the students over the head with a flood of unassailable facts that would convince even the most hard-headed student that this was indeed real, that this was indeed serious and that sustainability (including climate change) is the major challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. And we succeeded, but perhaps too well. Perhaps you do need to hit rock bottom to really understand (and feel) that this is real, that this is serious and that this is scary - but you also need to see what your own role could be in making positive changes happen in the world. So lately I have come to believe that we have been successful in getting students to understand the seriousness of the situation, but that we have failed them but making despair convincing - without making hope practical. 

The world has changed and so have the students. While we have toned down the gloominess, the course still hasn't changed enough to meet current students where they are. We don’t really need to convince students anymore that climate change and climate-related environmental disasters are real and that they are serious. Every year there's one or two new disaster right before or during the course. This year it was the catastrophic flash floods in Valencia just as the course started (see image above) and the catastrophic fires in LA. just as the course winded down (see image below).

So if we don't need to convince students that "shit just got real", what then is our task? The scholar and public intellectual Raymond Williams has said that "It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must resume and change and extend our campaigns" (in his book "Resources of Hope" (1989)). My own take-away version of this is that “It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must… extend our [teaching in this course]”.

Humanity is in bad spot, we are surely in overshoot and there is a risk that as we wake up to "the century of declines", there will be much suffering in decades to come. But this still doesn't answer the crucial question that I face as a researcher and as an educator and teacher, e.g. “taking all of that into account, what do we do now?”.

So to me as a researcher and teacher who want to do my bit in the transition to a sustainable society, I think my teaching is a better bet in terms of "impact" than my research. I educate engineering students who will start their careers a few years down the road, and I can't think of a task that is more important than to make them care about sustainability - and for at least some of them to care enough to also want to work towards the transition to a sustainable society. And this course (with 135 students) is my single best bet for changing the world, So how do we maximise the chance that taking this course has Positive Effects in the world? More concretely, how should the course be remade to increase the chance that as many students as possible, after they have finished the course, will feel (realistic) hope and a will to act on this hope (rather than, say, despair and passivity)? And what then needs to change in the course to help facilitate such a shift?

This is the starting point of a remake of the course before the next course round starts in a little less than nine months from now. This coming week I will meet up with colleagues who led seminar groups in the course for a two-hour brainstorming session, and I've also invited other people who are familiar with the course - including students who just finished taking it. 

One of the starting points will be the seven questions we spent time discussing at the very last seminar in the course. Students in eight different seminar groups each wrote multiple post-it notes to answer the following questions: 

1) What have you learned in this course about sustainability?

2) What have you learned in this course about yourself?

3) What is the single most important lesson you take away from this course?

4) As the course winds down, what do you feel most optimistic about?

5) As the course winds down, what do you feel most pessimistic about

6) Looking back, what advice would you like to give your younger self two months ago?

7) Looking back, what advice would you like to give your younger self two or five years ago?

So we have collected several 100s of post-it notes that will serve as a starting point for our discussions, and while my colleagues (and students) will help kick this off (there will be ≈ 10 of us), the responsibility to follow through and work with the results, and later to implement changes in the course, falls on me (with input and help from my colleague Elina Eriksson). And I'm ready to take responsibility for this task and hope the changes will make a difference for hundreds of our students in years to come.

#[informative-hashtag], #[motivational-hashtag], #[humblebrag-hashtag]

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