Science education for humanity: Pathways to sustainable impact

Event details

The event will take place on 24-26 March 2025 in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building, South Kensington Campus. Registration for this event is now OPEN, register for the event below.

 

Register for the eventSubmit a research poster for the Festival of Learning and Teaching 2025

The Festival of Learning and Teaching (FOLAT) is Imperial’s annual collaborative and celebratory forum of educational innovation and achievement across the university. This year the event will take place from Monday 24 March to Wednesday 26 March 2025 on the South Kensington campus.

Our focus for the event will be on sustainability in higher education. Over the three days we will consider this from several angles: how we develop our students’ and graduates’ understanding and commitment to sustainability through our STEMMB curricula; how we develop, share and motivate sustainable learning and teaching practices in the pursuit of our strong and varying educational goals; how we collaborate and support each other as a university community to foster and reward contributions towards developing a more sustainability-oriented culture.  

We aim to address tensions between sustaining excellence in terms of institutional goals and educational experiences and outcomes and building and maintaining strong and supportive relationships and sense of wellbeing. We will consider some of the current opportunities and challenges faced by our education communities, exploring over three days what sustainability in STEMM higher education means and how we can better embed sustainability informed approaches through our community’s approaches.

Explore the programme

Day 1: Teaching sustainability in STEMM

On the first day of FOLAT 2025, we want to celebrate the teaching and learning that allows students to learn about sustainability and tackle important problems through their disciplinary lenses and methods. This will include examples of how to embed sustainability into disciplinary teaching, pedagogies that are used to teach sustainability, and results of educational research. We welcome contributions from our staff and students, individually or in partnership.

Day 2: Sustainable learning and teaching practices

On the second day, we will shift the lens onto the sustainability of our approaches to learning and teaching. How can we continue to meet institutional and HE sector goals, providing high quality education and support for diverse groups of students, whilst paying attention to the importance of enriching and supportive social and academic relationships, and physical and mental wellbeing? How can we predict and prepare to respond to future expectations? External contributors will help us to think about factors that contribute to less sustainable educational experiences for students and teachers, and how to address these thorny issues, including working with uncomfortable emotion, envisioning a sustainable university teacher and compassion in assessment.

Day 3: Fostering a sustainable community and culture

Conversations on day 3 will examine a range of issues from a broader perspective, such as how a university remains relevant and valuable in a world where fundamental aspects of cognitive effort are managed and performed by artificial intelligence. What are the implications of such developments for the sustainability of our core educational mission? As we seek to measure our influence, how do we gather, make sense of and recycle education-related data in ways that both promote sustainable practice and sustain confidence in the impact of successful approaches. In the context of rapidly accelerating globalization, we will examine how our mission and impact is negotiated and co-constructed within our university community, and how it might be interpreted and experienced by stakeholder communities worldwide.