Unorthodox? Sustainability as Discursive Guidepost for Creating Transformative Agency in Professional Communication Education

Abstract

Based on recent work outlining the transformation of professional communicator roles and the desperate search for “curators” or “agents of change” in neighboring disciplines such as management, business and economics, sustainability studies and education, we present a systematic reflection of concepts in higher education for sustainability and their (missing) fit to professional communication education in a world in crisis. The blind spots and challenges identified, especially from a communication perspective, will be filled with concepts from environmental communication pedagogy, pointing to the need for more participatory strategies and radicality in professional communication education. Concrete modalities of instruction will be discussed and supported by eight reconstruction interviews with pedagogues, educators and students from diverse cultural contexts involved in sustainability communication education. The findings show the need for more radical pedagogy and unorthodoxy. The paper finishes with suggestions for practices that materialize sustainability in co-created sites of change.

1. Introduction: Wicked Problems—Agents of Change Desperately Needed

“Many billions, many crunches”. This is how the most recent “Conference of the Parties” (COP29, Baku) was described in the news (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/klimakonferenz-cop29-klimafonds-milliarden-studie-trump-lux.GrWEwpaPZsyeTYth7BxwVz?reduced=true, accessed on 6 December 2024) at the end of 2024 (by the way, the “hottest year on record” [1]), thereby sowing the seeds of doubt regarding the future survival prospects of humanity, and even delving deeper into public discourses about the climate crisis (or, permacrisis [2]), which happens increasingly in science communication and environmental communication as sub-disciplines of media and communication studies (see, for example, [3,4,5,6]). The true magnitude of its implications seems not to be reflected. Alongside the increase in the mediatization of climate change [7], however, we can trace back the evolution of a much more positive narrative in political and corporate communication: the sustainability story [8,9].

From a critical perspective, however, the sustainability narrative seems to be less a counter-story to the climate crisis story and therefore less “alternative” or “revolutionary” than initially thought. It is criticized as at best “reformist” and at worst “inherently reactionary” [10] (p. 229), [11]. From a professional communication perspective, one might even argue that the sustainability story has served politics and corporations well, in particular to just reframe their achieving and subordinating their progress orientation to an overarching narrative of transformation—or vice versa, subordinating the sustainability story to a narrative of economic growth [12]. Brown (2015) considers sustainability as an “empty signifier”, as a buzzword or “wicked term” appearing to address fundamental concerns but meaning very little or “all things to all people” [11] (p. 116). So, while on the one hand, sustainability has now made its terminological career within the narrative of economic progress and prosperity [13], a more critical and reflective perspective on it implies that it is actually impossible to define sustainability and it instead needs to be subject to constant revision and reflection [14] by incorporating diverse (even antagonistic) agents in these negotiation process. Referring back to [11], sustainability has been undermined at three levels, the level of the imaginary (the ability to imagine the future), the symbolic (the ability to at least gesture towards a more sustainable system) and the real (its discursive dependence on the exclusion of the future, most pronounced in neoliberal triumphalism) [11] (p. 130). Not giving alternative articulations of sustainability their conditions of being burdens particularly strategic communication and professional communication with guilt [15] because strategic sustainability communication has condensed various “ruptural points” in a generalized concern for the future, where a radically different approach would be required [11] (p. 131).

So, what is still missing so far is conceptual work and genuine theories to grasp the breadth of sustainability communication, going beyond the popularity of sustainability as an issue towards a deeper understanding of sustainability as guiding principle of action and potential universal value [8]. Because only as a guiding principle of action, sustainability gives space to openness for alternative articulations of sustainability. As mentioned briefly above, various disciplines, and in particular communication scholarship, feel stimulated by the transformational change discourse and by sustainability as concept and narrative—not only to develop new research questions but much more to reconsider their theoretical concepts in a world in crisis (see, for example, [8,16]). Hand in hand with these reflections, scholars rethink their courses, teaching programs and pedagogies, feeling the need for transformation (see, for example, [17]). Brüggemann and colleagues (2023) [18] plea for more transformative communication and media scholarship—and also talk about the implications of the climate crisis and the plethora of social, cultural and ecological challenges on not only research and public engagement but also teaching [19]. Being critical and cracking established patterns in what we teach and how we teach means one cannot stand on the sidelines [18] but rather that we need to raise awareness about problems, also wicked ones, and create resilience to cope with the wickedness and hypercomplexity of sustainability [13,20,21]. It also requires using new and potentially “unorthodox” means to “promote unsettling moments of reflection and debate” in our teaching [22] (p. 397). Therefore, this paper is on a quest to think about this “unorthodox” character of teaching—and discusses not so much why it is needed (the world in a crisis tells us) but rather what the barriers and opportunities are and why this is actually quite challenging from a teacher’s and a student’s perspective. This will be applied in the field of professional communication education.

The first chapter gives an overview of (higher) education for sustainability and “transformative education” and promoted concepts, also pointing to the blind spots, especially from a communication perspective. To shed light on these blind spots, in the literature review, we will unlock concepts from environmental communication pedagogy, with the aim of further developing the concept of regenerative pedagogy. Following this critical paradigm with suggested practices of activating imagination through connections, cracking through activism, and creation of sites of change meeting the three deficits outlined by Brown (see above) [11], we offer an empirical deep dive into five distinct cultural contexts (China, The Netherlands, Australia, Canada and Austria). With eight conversations, we explore the ideals and realities of practicing education in applied professional communication disciplines. The findings of these conversations (reconstruction interviews [23]) not only support a typology of how sustainability can guide professional communication education in the future but also open the door for a conceptualization of more radical, unorthodox pedagogy in the final chapter of the paper.

2. Literature Review: Education for Sustainability? Unlocking Concepts from Environmental Communication Pedagogy

In this first chapter, we offer a critical perspective on the status quo of (higher) education for sustainability and sustainability in professional communication education and develop a typology of how sustainability education is described so far, followed by the conceptualization of a third, more “unorthodox” way, which will be introduced at the end of this literature-based, conceptual chapter.

2.1. Higher Education for Sustainability

Achieving sustainability on a global scale through education has been a topic since the 1970s [24,25,26,27]. Especially universities and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are seen as great vessels through which the status quo can be changed, and it can reshape how individuals think, teach, learn, and navigate through the world [28]—which is a pretty high ambition and quite idealistic. Given an accelerating transglobal crisis or permacrisis, as mentioned above, universities stand at a pivotal crossroads and reflection on education’s role in a world fraught with ecological and socio-political complexity is essential [29]. However, challenging our ontologies and “recasting universities with a sustainable epistemology” [29] and thus higher education institutions undergoing a deep transformation process themselves [30,31] seems to be much harder compared to thinking about changes in pedagogies used in higher education for teaching sustainability [30,31], changes and adaptions in existing curricula [32] or new forms of learning about sustainability and transformation [33].

In this last-mentioned research on teaching sustainability, we can see that the first steps towards more critical perspectives are taken by showing that transmissive models of education are insufficient; therefore, the related literature states that a more action-oriented transformative pedagogy is needed [24]. And in fact, a growing number of studies assessing non-conventional pedagogies to educate future leaders are moving from a transmissive pedagogy to transformative pedagogy [34]. In these concepts, transformative learning means changing the perspectives, habits, and mindsets of individuals to develop an openness and ability to change [35]. In transformative pedagogy, students are pushed to critically think about their own assumptions and engage with social issues, thereby experiencing a shift in values and intentions [36,37]. In addition, making an emotional, imaginative connection with oneself and the social world is crucial for meaningful learning. This type of learning is more self-directed and problem-oriented, whereby learners should feel empowered to handle complex challenges themselves. Educators are vital within transformative learning [38], as they facilitate the students to develop the right skills and understanding for a meaningful discourse in the classroom about sustainability challenges [39]. Psychological safety and, thus, a trustful environment are needed, which implies that the educator must understand the learners’ attitudes, personalities, feelings, and preferences to be able to create a safe space [40]. In this space, content (systemic, thematic understanding), perspectives (power relationships), processes and context (connections) are the key drivers, determining the type of learning that occurs within real-world contexts [33]. What is not mentioned in this model is communication, personal authorship for the story of sustainability [41] and the key role of co-creation and creativity, which already resulted in the above claimed undermining of the level of the imaginary and the discursive dependence on the exclusion of alternative futures [11] (p. 130), as well as a “disbelief in any revolutionary endings” [9].

A few, more recent approaches in sustainability education and “transformational sustainability learning” point to the importance to re-think time as an important dimension in education and thus reconceptualize learning as evolutionary process [42]. Educators can use interventions as defining moments of change or design thinking (DT) and speculative design (e.g., [43]) as innovative ways to establish a problem-solving approach to meet the complexity of sustainability and solve complicated challenges [44]. But even if design thinking connects conflicting interests and requires creative re-definition [45], it works with a strongly human-centred perspective, seeing students “flourishing into sustainability leaders” [46]. So, even if there are specific concepts suggested for what is called “transformational learning”, we can see that the idea of innovative or more radical pedagogies is still quite vague and still somewhat “orthodox”, because it does not speak of disciplinary differences or challenges. So, even if the learning is conceptualized as competency-driven, it is not aligned with or tailored to specific disciplines. The orthodoxy can also be seen in the way technology is used as a tool to facilitate learning (for example, [46,47]) and not as an active partner in transformation [48]. Also, the concepts discussed in the literature on higher education for sustainability are mostly referring to existing sustainability or sustainable development frameworks published by the UN [49,50] or the European Union [51], but communication, and especially professional communication and related competences, does not play a major role in those roadmaps—similar to the theoretical concepts reflected on above [52]. A closer look though shows the competences listed overlap with professional communication as a social practice, for example, in the category of embodying sustainability values [51] (p. 14), where a core competence is “promoting nature”, followed by “problem framing” in the category of embracing complexity in sustainability—but again, not actually integrated in education for sustainability or transformational learning concepts.

Thus, we can state that the first blind spot in terms of sustainability education and learning combining the academic literature and sustainability competence frameworks is the following:

Problem 1.

Professional communication is not part of education for sustainability concepts and competence frameworks.

2.2. Sustainability in Professional Communication Education

Disciplinary and sub-disciplinary uniqueness and related theoretical concepts and pedagogies are also not considered in the literature on education for sustainability, sustainability learning and transformative education in a higher education setting. This is why we want to delve deeper into the specifics of professional communication, especially PR, organizational and strategic communication education, to uncover where sustainability and transformational change are taught and embedded in programs and what competences and roles are discussed. Since there is nearly no literature available on that, desk research offers at least a few numbers: from 2755 Master’s programs somehow related to sustainability and communication (https://www.mastersportal.com/search/master?kw-what=sustainability%20communication; 8576 programs are somehow linked to sustainability, accessed on 28 December 2024.) (globally in 2024), there are only two programs that are specifically labeled as “Sustainability Communication” (Jönköping University, Sweden) or “Strategic Communication, Leadership and Sustainability” (University of Huddersfield, UK). Next to that, media and communication programs created modules and courses, covering sustainability and, for example, Corporate Social Responsibility, as topics, often in collaboration with related research centers (see, for example, https://www.uni-muenster.de/Nachhaltigkeit/en/, accessed on 28 December 2024) and mostly either at a business school or at least in a business communication-focused program (see, for example, https://learn.wu.ac.at/vvz/24w/1883m, accessed on 28 December 2024). On the other hand, looking at global BA platforms, over 30,000 Bachelor’s programs were found when the search terms sustainability and communication were included—however, no specific programs entitled “sustainability communication” (https://www.bachelorsportal.com/search/bachelor?kw-what=sustainability%20communication, accessed on 28 December 2024) are offered. Nearly all programs solely create a link to sustainability as an important issue or goal to reach, signaled, for example, with sentences like “you learn to use technology to improve people’s lives and advance sustainability” (https://www.hamk.fi/en/degree/ict-robotics/, accessed on 28 December 2024). This scenery is complemented by an influx of executive education programs at established institutions and specifically focused on new formats and online offerings (e.g., Tomorrow University (https://www.tomorrow.university, accessed on 28 December 2024). Some empirical evidence was published by Karmasin and Voci in 2021 [53]; the authors give a reason for the lack of offerings with disciplinary and sub-disciplinary uniqueness and related theoretical concepts and pedagogies by pointing out that instead of translating sustainability or sustainable development into a dedicated course offer, the SDGs are often used as a framework that certain coursework is “linked to”, because higher education institutions started to (re)structure their internal systems (research, outreach, community engagement, campus operations, administration, teaching and learning) to contribute to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development (also supported by [30,54]). This not only requires sustainability or transformational leadership [55], including heads of departments, deans, vice-rectors and rectors [34], but also coursework that is contributing to reaching these goals. Especially business schools have become a signatory of the official “Principles for Responsible Management Education, PRME”, a United Nations initiative that aims at realigning business schools with the SDGs and the UN’s Global Compact [56,57]. The idea behind that is that all staff members of the university and external stakeholders are made aware of the university’s role in changing higher education for sustainable development [55]. According to these authors, this is the reason behind the already mentioned increase in sustainability leadership development training programs, such as executive education, leadership programs, new online learning platforms, etc., but a lack of a true and deep integration of sustainability education and transformational learning in undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

Overall, we need to state that the level of curricular integration of sustainability aspects especially in the fields of communication, media communication and in particular professional communication is still very low and mostly on a module and course level [53]. Therefore, the second challenge in the context of this paper can be described in the following way:

Problem 2.

Education for sustainability and transformative education is not an integral part of professional communication education (yet).

2.3. Typology of Sustainability Communication Education So Far

So, overall, we can summarize the status quo of education in a sustainability and communication context with the following typology (see Figure 1).

Firstly, the literature review shows that there is an increasing number of offerings, where sustainability is taught in a specific course or at least where sustainability is an aspect of a course or program. These are predominantly business programs (for example business, corporate or leadership communication) or courses in a PR or communication program at business schools and universities following a business logic—either disciplinary (for example, a university of economics) or as business model (cost/service model of Anglo-American universities). All these programs, courses and offerings fall into Type A of our framework, with the consequence that sustainability is subordinated to the story of progress and economic growth; sustainability is predominantly seen as an issue that businesses communicate towards their stakeholders. Knowledge transfer and information are the key communication processes that are looked at and learning outcomes are related skills to professionalize communication of sustainability [58].

Secondly, in the literature on higher education, communication is treated as sustainability competence but often hidden behind concepts like leadership, problem solving or participatory approaches (see again, for example, [25,30,59]. Type B covers any programs and courses where sustainability is not treated as a specific issue but embedded in coursework and programs across disciplines. It also implies the openness for alternative narratives of sustainability and transformation within the sustainable development framework.

2.4. Sustainability as Pedagogical Protocol—A Third Way

But there is hope! We want to complement the two existing concepts (A and B) with a third-way perspective and introduce “sustainability learning” as a concept where communication is approached as constitutive and therefore includes sense- and meaning-making—with sustainability as a guiding principle of action or protocol (Type C, see Figure 2).

For this third way, we build on the abovementioned transformative learning concepts, focusing on individuals developing openness and ability to change (see again [39]). In transformative pedagogy, students are pushed not only to put their own assumptions into question but also to look beyond the situation as a social issue. To engage with nature, their environment and place, the crisis and actual phenomena in their context, means that one can thereby experience a shift in values and intentions [36,37]. Combined with a perspective on communication as resource [60] and adding a constitutive and (per)formative perspective on communication [61], the question is not any more about specific programs or coursework but much more about who the people are who are entering universities as conversational spaces and how they develop not (just) “sustainability competences” or “sustainability communication skills” but rather what Hendersson and Wamsler (2020) [9] called authorship or Schaltegger et al. (2024) [62] and Weder et al. (2024) [63] called agency in a world in crisis and what is called ecocultural identity in environmental pedagogy [64].

Recent scholarly work shows that “curators of change” are highly needed and should be institutionalized as new roles in organizations to drive sustainability transformation [62]. Indeed, over the past decade, numerous new professional roles have emerged next to sustainability management, such as environmental, sustainability, CSR, DEI, and ESG management and communication [63]. This includes the facilitation of related projects, training or actual reporting and controlling as well as strategic planning processes and organizational development. These roles are no longer solely an “add-on” to existing HR or communication roles but have more and more reached the “C-Suite,” attaining a strategic and management level. Similarly, while media and communication studies and related subdisciplines educate students for their roles as journalists, PR professionals, content creators, spokespersons, advertisers, marketers, corporate communicators or even influencers, new roles are emerging in the realm of mobilization, advocacy and education. Recently published work showed that the work of communicators, especially strategic communicators, changed over time [8]. Platform-specific engagement, audience engagement and adaptation, as well as pedagogical methods, are increasingly asked for, especially from those professionals who want to be seen as an agent or even disruptor [65]. Here, an agent is described as someone who acts—and who is responsible for their activities (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) [66]. Agency is further discussed as characteristic of transformative actors, actors who have the moral and ethical duty, and in a crisis, to act responsibly and sustainably. This can be related back to the idea of transformative or sustainability learning by putting one’s own values into question and being open for change; transformative agency then means the ability to act as such and in simple terms, being conscious and caring for the individual actions (Ling & Dale, 2014) [67]. Agency is therefore not “given” or set, instead it emerges as a crucial element in transformation processes, guided by sustainability as protocol, enabling individuals to adapt to change and navigate crises. Agency is further theorized as the driving force behind social action, underlining an individual’s awareness of their ability to exert influence and therefore normative competence. Normative competence involves the ability to grasp and apply moral reasoning, to govern one’s behavior through such reason, and the ability to navigate different narrative environments, which is why agency is communicatively constructed and realized in communicative interactions, based on communication as resource. So, what else does Type C imply?

As outlined before, a different understanding of (sustainability) learning apparently includes critique and participation. Therefore, we draw on environmental communication pedagogies to fill the identified blind spots and meet the challenges and problems identified by further adding to the conceptualization of an (ideal) Type C.

Environmental communication scholarship and thinking about regenerative pedagogy focuses on fostering moral character (agency) in individuals [68] through processes of deconstruction, restoration, and regeneration seen as necessary for transformational change on all levels. In general, most environmental communication frameworks allow for a different, more critical perspective. Therefore, environmental communication pedagogy encompasses education that is built on tenets of reflexivity and emancipation as well as identity processes and “transformative learning” (as mentioned above [35]). We follow the transformative pedagogy tenets of survive, critique, and create, firstly discussed by O’Sullivan (2002) [69] and further developed by Milstein (2024) [68] and Weder and Milstein (2021) [70]. These three tenets are at the core of regenerative pedagogy, in other words, teaching and learning that directly tends to the global shift to restore, respect, and regenerate ecological and societal balance with being locally and globally salient. These guideposts meet the three levels where sustainability so far has been undermined: the level of the imaginary, symbolic and real [11]. A critical constructivist approach and the three discourses of transformative education (survive, critique and create) can be further developed into the concept of critical agency. Critique in our context means resistant negation and affirmative creation of new practices. Without going much deeper into the differences between the concept of critical agency developed by American pragmatists and “anti-anthropocentric” approaches (see, for example, [71]), we conceptualize the characteristics of critical agency through the three practices mentioned above, linking the contingency of critical agencies with an image of the future [72].

• Critical agency includes (1) activating imagination through connections, (2) cracking through activism (gestures, signaling, questioning) and (3) creation of sites of change as the “new real”.

Then, sustainability learning is what Weder and Milstein called a “collective sensemaking process that is always also beyond the human sphere in its earthly articulations”, expanding the role of an active learner to a conscious actor [70] and, in the process, cultivating and effectively engaging “their interconnected existence, and efficacy, within wider integral ecological and cultural systems” [70] (p. 55). Sustainability learning leads to critical agency, which requires pedagogies in context, which means pedagogies that are

-

Relative to the participants;

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Relative to the purpose and program;

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Relative to the projects—all embedded in a specific context.

Only then, the epistemological, ontological, methodological and axiological breadth and depth that is required can be realized [71]. Pedagogies considered in context imply rather unconventional and unorthodox strategies, from emancipatory or democratic approaches to pedagogies with a stronger focus on interchangeable roles in the learning space. Storytelling (students writing their sustainability stories, reclaiming authorship for alternative sustainability narratives) or visualizations of sustainability (collecting social representations of sustainability on a Miro board or a social media platform) to avoid terminological incrustation are related didactical elements. Thus, unorthodoxy in our context means to apply unusual and unconventional didactics with a focus on communication and conversational spaces enabled for alternative sense- and meaning-making in a world in crisis.

The question that remains open is whether Type C is realistic or just a romanticized approach to teaching? What is possible—and what is not? In other words,

• (RQ) What are the obstacles and barriers of unorthodox pedagogy in professional communication disciplines?

The “third way” of sustainability learning was the subject of eight conversations with pedagogues, educators and students in sustainability (communication)-related programs and courses in different cultural and organizational settings.

3. Methodology: Institutioning Change—A Conversational Approach

As the aim of this paper was to study (new) ways of professional communication education and learning related to sustainability, and therefore human social behavior and roles (for example student or teacher), we chose an exploratory approach. Institutioning change is used as the title for the empirical part of this paper because with the typology (Figure 1) in mind, the aim of the study was to capture various institutional frames that inform education, teaching and learning as processes and, conversely, learn how these processes inform institutionalized frames in different systems for higher education and related programs and courses.

Reconstruction as Methodological Design

Qualitative research seeks to understand social and individual practices and behavior, dissect complex processes, and provide in-depth, human-centered insights (Bryman, 2016) [73]. With semi-structured reconstruction interviews [23,74,75], we examined ideals and practices and reflections on an individual level. This specific interview technique starts by creating an “access point” to understand a professionals’ identity and social position [23] (p. 3) in a specific context, which is often disregarded [75]; however, it is the external political, economic, ideological, etc., factors that shape the (self-)negotiation of roles and the individual doing. The reconstruction interview allows us to study the negotiation of ideals and practice in a specific context [23] (p. 4), without idealizing best practices, by focusing on reconstructing how the interviewees communicate, teach, learn and experience pedagogical initiatives and specific didactics (see also [74]). Therefore, in line with Schwinges’ [23] (p. 4) recommendations, our semi-structured interviews asked participants to talk about specific examples of sustainability related education and to explicitly describe the role they played in that initiative and the skills they utilized and the impact of this specific situation.

Since there is not (always) a specific product of sustainability learning that can be used as the mentioned “access point”, we needed to refine and adopt the concept of reconstruction interviews. We developed a conversational approach, including teacher and student roles in the conversations. Figure 2 gives an overview of the conversations and participants as well as the role of the authors of this paper in the conversations. The conversations were set up in educational settings where the co-authors of this paper worked/studied sustainability-related courses or programs (see Figure 3). Therefore, we created every interview as conversational space with at least one of the authors (as “interactive” researchers, [76]) taking one perspective (teacher/student) to capture reflections from different perspectives on culturally homogenous (China) versus culturally heterogenous classes (Australia, Europe, Canada) and discuss boundaries of more or less activist and critical pedagogies (Australia vs. Europe), obstacles, conflicts and boundaries of unorthodoxy in teaching and learning.

For the recruitment of the interview partners, we used a convenience snowballing process [77]. Individuals were recruited through our professional and individual networks; those individuals were then asked to refer us to other suitable interview partners, which works if the scope of the research includes only a very specific and small group of people [77] (the interviews were conducted partly live and partly through Zoom. This allowed the participants to be interviewed in a location of their choosing and enabled the transcription to be automatically generated. Each interview lasted between 30 and 60 min). It is also valuable when exploring relationships between individuals (here, students and teachers) and groups to learn more about a specific context or social systems; the study does not aim for generalizability of findings.

Reconstruction interviews and conversational analysis share their social constructionist understanding and interest in “turn-by-turn sequences” in conversations. The application of reconstruction interviews in an organized conversational setting assumes that the meaning of participants’ utterances is determined by how others make sense of it [78,79]. The “interaction sequences” were demarcated by themes, e.g., obstacles, in teaching sustainability which were then discussed amongst the co-authors and led to the methodological choice of applying a content analytical technique of inductive category building (multiple coding of categories counted) to analyze the recorded, transcribed and cleaned interview data. The result of this specific type of analysis is a system of inductively developed categories and the possibility to generate corresponding frequencies (see also [80]). The findings and insights will be discussed in detail in the following paragraphs, summarized in Figure 4.

4. Findings: Sustainability Still Subordinated to a Business Logic

The conversations in the five chosen education settings show clearly that sustainability is still subordinated to the business logic and taught within a narrative of capitalism and market dynamics. Communication is approached as a tool to support sustainable development—on a societal but mainly an organizational level, where students sometimes want to stay in their comfort zones, which is one of the central boundaries for radical pedagogy and related public scholarship in practice.

4.1. Sustainability Bound to Business Logic and Pre-Defined

Planning the conversations, we included scholars and students from business schools as well as universities offering a broader, non-specialized curriculum in different education systems related to costs and funding. Universities in Europe are mostly publicly funded, and tuition is low or even free for domestic/EU students, whereas in the “Anglo-American” system, education is significantly more expensive, with often high tuition fees at private but also at public universities, for domestic as well as international students. The interviewees across all education systems share the observation that sustainability is mostly tied to business courses and programs, where sustainability issues are still very firm-centered. For example, sustainability projects at technical universities are always in collaboration with a company to create, for example, more efficient technologies (P3, The Netherlands; P2 The Netherlands). This results in a fairly narrow approach to sustainability and socio-ecological transformation, with a lack in climate and natural science background, as has been mentioned in the conversation with professors from The Netherlands.

“Therein lies a bit of a challenge, because a number of our educators don’t have natural science backgrounds and such. But our managers of today and tomorrow, they certainly will need to make that connection, that link between businesses and social ecological systems.”

(P1, The Netherlands).

Another professor, who taught in China, sheds light on the role communication can play to change people’s mindset that business and ecology are inherently intertwined (P6, China). Communicating the interconnectedness of business and ecology in combination with supporting pedagogies where students physically go out to the source of the problem (for example, to farmlands) to interact or perform research with the individuals being affected, is a way to obtain a holistic understanding of the problem (P1, The Netherlands). This is further supported and elaborated on by a professor in sustainable food, who sees a gap between the doers (for example, farmers and chefs) who understand the subject from a practical standpoint but who cannot explain it academically or turn it into accessible data, and the laymen in academia who could be able to document this and work within educational systems (P5, Canada).

One serious issue that arose in the interviews was that the terminology used in sustainability was too abstract. Choosing clearer or more specific terminology to make the concepts more tangible and to express the urgency of the situation is an extremely important aspect of professional communication (P8, Austria). For example, communicating about sustainability with the term mass extinction instead of climate change can alter the way the issue is perceived. In addition, the meaning and concept of sustainability differ between countries, often creating even more ambiguity. An economics professor and trainer who taught in China explains the following:

“I had to get away from the conception that circle economy is not recycling. I really had to hammer that in. That was a challenge. They were open, they understood, and they were smart people. There was no lack of intelligence in the classes, it was just the cultural perception.”

(P6, China)

This cultural aspect becomes even more complex when, in addition to potential language barriers, international students with different cultural backgrounds interpret Anglo-derived terminology in their own way. A Canadian professor describes the problems faced in classrooms:

“I would say, 75% of the students in the class were international students, primarily using English as a second language. And so I came in to teach about sustainability in the ways that I understand that word, and it became pretty clear very quickly that we did not share the same definitions of sustainability… And in our classroom, we had students from I don’t know, 15–20 different countries, all of which had different experiences with this English word sustainable, or a translation of the English word sustainable, because it’s such an Anglo derived concept”

(P7, Canada)

To summarize, the interview partners pointed to the challenges related to the terminology and definitions and the lack of time and space to discuss varying definitions, understandings and different cultural perspective on sustainability as a “Western principle”, which creates a lack of communication about sustainability.

4.2. Internationalization as Constraint for a New Teacher/Student Relationship

In the context of cultural differences, also the teacher/student relationship was put into question.

“I am trying to break the habit that I’m the only expert in the room. Like anyone else, because I’m not as relevant as you might be… so use everybody’s expertise to collaborate”

(P5, Canada)

But a new understanding of the teacher/student relationship does not work in every education system. In fact, there are many constraints discussed in the conversations. In an Australian context, a PhD student explains the following:

“if a teacher comes in from a very different context, they are not really local, locally-bound or place based; they come from very different countries, especially in an international master—this forces them in a situation where they try to hold their status up high. The cultural fit is a challenge, students and teacher try to cope with the system, often new for both—which creates a much more static teacher-student relationship and a lack of openness”

(P4, Australia).

Also, a business school setting or a university that works with a cash-for-service logic (Anglo-American universities in particular) brings “a cost for service relationship where students perceive education to be within right now… The sort of neoliberalism, too, is like that sort of every student has to be met at their level. Well, that’s not possible. And yet that’s what a lot of them expect.” (P7, Canada).

Furthermore, the way universities operate does not always provide opportunities for students to learn, experiment, and get deeply involved in systems changes (for example, social protests, take-back systems for utensils or other experimental grounds for new ideas), mentioned by (P1, The Netherlands). However, the cost-for-service relationship students have does not open up for new types of interactions, as they expect a certain type of service (which does not always align with systems changes), especially in China or South Korea, where interactive learning approaches apparently seem to be more difficult, as the teaching style is more lecture-based and hierarchical (P6, China; A2, The Netherlands). Is more radicality needed?

4.3. Is Radical Change Needed? Radicality Is Needed!

The conversations led with pedagogues and students in sustainability (communication) education gave a very consistent idea of current challenges; at the same time, pretty much all interview partners agreed, “Education, it has to change radically!” (P6, China).

What is seen as particularly critical are the “authorized and self-affirmative ways of teaching PR, and strategic communication” (A1, Austria). Cracking patterns in teaching and therefore being guided by sustainability as principle of action was also mentioned by a teacher in The Netherlands. The interviewee claimed new ways to “create empathy of students within the topic of sustainability, trying to make them not only engage with what they learn, but really proactive, in terms of wanting to be doing something. And this is such a crucial and essential element of transformative education.” (P2, The Netherlands).

The interviewed Canadian pedagogue also reflected on feeling constrained but being willing to “break” the system, to be unorthodox and fill the identified gaps moving from sustainability education to sustainability learning:

“But that idea of a gap and needing to fill a gap as an individual, if I am faced with a blank space, mind and my body, my emotions will work to fill in that space. And that’s what I try to now do with my class work, is to sort of set up intentional disconnects.”

(P7, Canada)

These new pedagogical pathways lead to three strategies which are very close to what has been developed conceptually along the ideas for a more radical pedagogy—unorthodox—in the context of sustainability and transformation: the guideposts of survival of paradigm shifts through community building, meaningful critique and creation lead to the three practices using communication as resource: activating imagination through connections, cracking through activism and creation of sites of change. One of the interviewed teachers stated the following:

“I have learned other ways of thinking about sustainability, which include things like relational exchange of knowledge rather than top-down exchange of knowledge where I don’t have all the knowledge about sustainability in the world to transfer to my students. I listened to them. I learned from them. We talk about things together; we share our experiences. That kind of relational learning, I think, is also necessary in teaching and learning about sustainability.”

(P7, Canada)

Experiences and conversations about learning seem to be key.

“I think you need to really be thinking about more engaging pedagogies. My general idea of teaching is always about experiential learning, so getting learners so that they actually experience things. And they get to learn with heads, their hands, you know, and their hearts.”

(P1, The Netherlands)

The aim of the conversations was to explore Type C, sustainability learning, with a specific focus on what we called critical agency. The findings show that connections between students and students and teachers are often hindered by internationalization and business orientation as institutional logic. What has been pointed to though was the key role of sites of change, spaces that are opened through problematization and questioning, that lead to creativity and experiential learning. However, imagination of alternative futures or, more specifically, alternative sustainability narratives are hindered by pre-defined concepts and managerial and functional lenses, especially taken when it is about sustainability communication. In the table that follows, we summarize the insights from the interviews pointing to the main challenges or boundaries of a radical scholarship that would be needed to develop critical agency.

5. Conclusions and Outlook: Materializing Sustainability as Key in Radical Pedagogy

The study at hand has shown that a third way in sustainability education is not easy—especially not in professional communication education, where sustainability-related programs and coursework are mostly defined by narrow business interests and—similar to businesses—presented as way to “serve to curtail interests of external stakeholder” [81] (p. 51) by communicating sustainability to specific audiences, treating communication as a tool rather than a resource, tapping its full “radical potential” [15,82].

While there is an increased consciousness for a constitutive role of communication and sustainability-related sense- and meaning-making processes in the classroom, what seems to still be missing, or at least the major challenge, is the so-called sites of change [70,83], in which ways of being otherwise can be both imagined and experienced—which is needed to enable “place-based transformative learning” [84]. The interviews show that what students enjoy the most are specific projects, engagements, interventions or action-based approaches, which shows that sustainability needs to be actually materialized—which goes hand in hand with creating sites for change as alternative spheres by offering learning experiences that cross, dim or even erase the lines between the institution of academia and the public. If sustainability is a principle of action, then it stimulates us not only as researchers to think beyond rather one-directional, information-focused communication strategies; it also provokes us as teachers to rethink our ontologies, the way we pick research topics and deal with them. And it foremost challenges our very own self-defined roles as pedagogues and potential agents of change, not just in our own institution but beyond in a changing society.

We acknowledge that our conversations were prone to selection biases (with pedagogues, trainers and students in our networks), to moderator bias (as we took an active part in the conversations and brought in our experiences and cases), as well as social desirability bias (sustainability-related conversations tend to be “over-moralized”; see also Weder et al., 2019 [85]).

Despite those limitations, our study has important implications for the study and practice of professional communication education in the future and putting the orthodoxy in teaching and learning into question—specifically without shifting the responsibility to the system (business programs or business universities), but bottom up, participatory and co-creational. Firstly, this research has shown that since sustainability practices and knowledge is changing so fast, the relationship between the students and the teachers should be relational, where both parties are learning from each other and share their experiences with sustainability. Examples have been mentioned by teachers in The Netherlands, Australia and Austria, such as online and offline conversational spaces, within and outside of the classroom. Furthermore, the pedagogical philosophy that underlines a radical pedagogy for professional communication in a changing world implies a strong tie between sustainability-related—or guided—thinking and everyday life, individual experiences, values and actual material phenomena. Therefore, tangible interactions are key—and the interviews have shown that it is not only about social interactions (based on participatory and inclusive forms of teaching) but also about interactions with nature and the material world. Using tangible interactions with sustainability can also be supported by communicating with concrete terminology. Teaching sustainability goes beyond environmental pedagogy and didactics applied in environmental studies and related programs. The suggested pathway rather leads to creating and sharing tangible narratives and materializing new forms of communication and storytelling.

The question therefore is not only if there is a lack of sustainability “artifacts” but much more if there is the need to create new artifacts—which brings professional communication in, as well as the question of what role artifacts can play in social, cultural and environmental change. This opens the door to design as a research discipline, which investigates how processes—like sustainability storytelling—can be engaged as a means to challenge the status quo [86], to mobilize publics and engage communities [87] and, most importantly, to provide alternative ways of thinking about and engaging with wicked and social problems [88].

On a more general level, the paper at hand opens a door to further think about the role of design and materiality in education following a more radical pedagogy. Physical interaction to drive story experiences seems to be key in any forms of learning about and for sustainability in a world in crisis. Interactions in and beyond the classroom need to be directed toward engagement with sustainability to create tangible (alternative) narratives. Rather than following the concept of storytelling as means or tool to fulfill an education goal (competences, skills, etc.) or transfer the sustainability story to a specific audience and thus follow the characteristics of a story such as plot, character, etc., the story itself needs to be tangible. This requires materiality such as a sound, a piece of art, an energy-powered computer or platform that allows interaction between people and the material world and allows individuals to actually participate in sustainable development through immersive storytelling experiences, from three-dimensional shapes and objects to flat surfaces and virtual reality.

Design is a discipline that gives form to alternative futures—therefore, we recommend to further integrate material exploration in sustainability communication research as well as to think about strategic communication pedagogies and practices.