They also asked students how they wanted support throughout the year, which varied with each set of housemates from monthly or once‐a‐semester meetings to ad hoc support through a Facebook group chat when students had specific questions. The role of the sustainability practitioner removed the direct connection between academic staff with official responsibilities toward students through teaching and credit‐bearing assessment, and the students' personal time and space. What can we learn from these experiences of relevance to supporting student activism more generally?
Projects that span the formal and informal curriculum can sit in an awkward space where both staff and student identities become blurred, expectations diverge, and the locus of control and self‐determination shifts. Such projects span both the public and private spheres of student life. This caused several challenges. For the sustainability practitioner staff, who had a more informal relationship with students, were uncomfortable with how much of their personal lives students disclosed to them. Tensions also arose as a result of staff seeing university benefit for the project, and therefore tried to bring the students' private sphere into the public sphere through more direct control over the project, enforcing traditional staff–student power hierarchies, but within the students' private space. Although as an academic member of staff we may look on and see the lost potential of elements of the project, it should be remembered that this is student‐led, that it is in their own private sphere into which we must be invited and onto which we cannot impose. Therefore, we must co‐create the project expectations with students rather than impose our expectations, and ultimately be sensitive to their lives as students.
Staff support can clearly be important in a number of ways, including negotiating institutional structures and power dynamics, and advocating on behalf of students where others in the university may be cautious about student‐led initiatives. Brinkman and Hirsch (2019) found that successful student advocacy projects involved staff from an early stage, providing continued mentoring and access to resources and social capital that a student might not have. Additionally, permanent staff may make it easier to help keep long‐range projects going beyond the length of any individual student's time at university (Brinkman and Hirsch 2019; Laycock Pedersen et al. 2019). Ludlow (2010) describes how staff support can help unpick problematic issues of academic accuracy in student's work before it is more widely disseminated. Ludlow (2010) also highlights the risks that are required of activism, the potential challenge that comes with activism, and hence the need for mechanisms of clear accountability and avenues through which the intended audience can feed back. While in some ways it may be recommended that an academic member of staff takes on this role, particularly where activism is situated as part of formal curriculum activities, Ludlow (2010) discusses the dangers of staff seeing themselves as “protectors” of the students and the reinforcement of hierarchies that activist learning may seek to challenge.
The areas discussed here are all important areas of development of change agency. However, if such functions are carried out on behalf of and in isolation from students, then the opportunity for students to develop these change agency attributes becomes limited. Nor will learning about these processes of change consciously occur without reflection. Therefore, we suggest ensuring that students are included in these processes, treated as partners, and included in communication, and reflective discussions are facilitated, which might incorporate the role of more “academically neutral” university support.
The promotion of activist learning holds potential risk for academic staff (Ludlow 2010; Williford 2015), although this risk will in part be related to their standing and institutional capital (Ludlow 2010). The willingness to take such risks can relate to staff identities as professional activists (Costa et al. 2021a,b), also referred to as scholar‐activists (Williford 2015). Although many ESD educators and practitioners might not see themselves as activists, many could be described as such, based on activist characteristics of knowing that they cannot take a neutral position, the desire to change the world (Ollis 2008), and the championing and challenging for systemic change (Costa et al. 2021a). By encouraging activist learning for students, work itself becomes a place of activism for the educator and practitioner. Bubriski and Semaan (2009: 96) encourage the educator to push students to “come out of their comfort zone – to try something new and potentially scary”; maybe we as educators should also be challenging ourselves in the same way.
2.7 Conclusion and Recommendations
The SSH project is student‐led, aligned to the formal curriculum, and aims to enact social change through providing opportunities for exploration of sustainable living for future students, inspiring and informing a wider student body about sustainable living, developing change agency skills, and changing habits and behaviors of the students residing in the SSH itself. We therefore feel this project deserves the moniker of “activist learning.”
As with most activism‐oriented educational projects, the SSH project is limited in its lack of longitudinal evaluation of the impacts of such an approach. Such evaluation across a range of timescales is needed to help us understand what makes quality, not just any, activist learning.
In Table 2.3 we provide a series of recommendations that can be used to support activist learning across the formal, non‐formal/informal, and hidden curriculum.
Table 2.3 Recommendations to support activist learning.
| Curricula position of activism | Recommendation for educators |
|---|---|
| Activism projects in the formal curriculum | Create a range of project opportunities to suit different students and stages of activist engagement, from student‐initiated projects to choices of prescribed projectsBe sensitive to different cultural interpretations and associations of activismEncourage reflection on links between activist projects and the Sustainable Development Goals and sustainability competenciesUse sustainability competency frameworks (e.g. UNESCO 2017) to support reflection framingProvide support for students particularly with negotiating different avenues of power, governance, and decision‐making, but include students as partners in the processBuild in evaluation of the impact of activism projects on students at different timescales (gaining permission/communication channels for future contact for longer‐term longitudinal evaluation)Encourage and support more staff to engage students in activism projects throughout their degrees |
| Using the formal curriculum to support informal and hidden curriculum activism | Include theories of activism and activist learning in the formal curriculumEmphasize the importance of inclusion and participant diversity as part of activism and sustainability requirementsIntroduce reflective models and case studies of reflection used in activismEmphasize the role of reflective practice in learning and project successEncourage students to question what they see and what they want from the campus environmentEncourage students to understand their power and agency as key stakeholders in the university and wider communities.Help students to understand the structures of universities and other organizations that can support change (such as Students' Unions)Develop a curriculum which aims to inspire and empower students to take actionUse the formal curriculum to develop effective group and communication skills, techniques, and understanding.Encourage quality relationships with academic and non‐academic staff, providing a safe place to seek support to initiate projects |
| Informal activism with staff involvement |
Ensure clear boundaries, responsibilities and expectations of staff and students are discussed at the start and reviewed. What support do students want from staff?Encourage consideration of the impact of activities on inclusion of diverse participantsInvolve academically neutral staff (e.g. university sustainability practitioners) as direct contact with students to reduce tensions and conflicts between different staff roles,
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