Navigating hope and despair in sustainability education: A reflexive roadmap for being with eco-anxiety in the classroom

Abstract

In this article, we reflect on our experiences of teaching sustainability in management education in an emergent context of increasing and pervasive eco-anxiety. Our collaborative autoethnographic enquiry stemmed from the tensions we experienced in our desire to present a realistic view of the future to students, while still maintaining their (and our) sense of hope and agency. While sustainability in management education has long acknowledged the need to engage learners’ hearts and hands as well as their heads, the challenges of effectively integrating the emotional (heart) dimension in the classroom have remained under-explored in the literature. We develop the findings of our collaborative autoethnography into a framework that provides insights for educators navigating the range of emotional responses evoked in the sustainability in management education classroom. This framework acts as a roadmap, based around five spheres of practice, that will aid sustainability in management education educators in making more conscious and deliberate choices about their teaching practice within the complex context of eco-anxiety.