U21 Teaching for Sustainability Symposium 2022

On the 16th and 17th February 2022 Lund University hosted the 2022 U21 Educational Innovation Symposium on the theme ‘Teaching for Sustainability’.  

With almost 600 registrations across the six sessions and 170 individuals from 22 member institutions attending, it was our biggest ever Educational Innovation event. We heard from 20 speakers and panelists from eight U21 members and four external partners, including PwC and Save The Children.  

A new feature for the symposium was a student panel who discussed their views and answered questions from the audience on incorporating sustainability into their learning. We had over 70 students volunteer to be on the panel and were delighted to be able to feature a selection of these engaged volunteers from across the network and be joined by others in the audience. One of the key takeaways from the symposium was to consider how we can embed staff and faculty interaction and collaboration across more of our work in educational innovation.  

Some of the other key discussions from the symposium were the role we can all play in collaborating with and influencing external organisations which shape the world around us, the importance of learning how to communicate with people we disagree with and that interdisciplinary approaches and giving people the skills to work in this way are essential to progress on sustainability.  

There is much innovation happening across the network which was shared so well at this event. We could not say it better than one of our attendees who commented that they ‘would like to bottle the disposition of the speakers’ as they had felt so inspired.  

We look forward to working with Lund University to share the outputs of the symposium and outline next steps at the AGM in May 2022. In the meantime you can access the recordings of the sessions and view the speakers’ details on our symposium overview page.