New SEEd Sustainability Journey: Where is SEEd in making change?
At SEEd, we place great importance on creativity and experimenting with new ideas. This is also true of our newsletter, and we are therefore delighted to launch the new academic year with a new edition.
This year, we will explore SEEd’s thoughts, values, and mission in depth through specific themes. Our orienting question will be: Where is SEEd in making change? To answer this question, we’re harnessing the power of the SEEd Newsletter, aiming to connect the work of SEEd with broader societal issues and the impact we are having on the lives of students, teachers and their environments. We will gradually create a systems map of SEEd’s actions and impacts to open up discussions about SEEd’s mission. These discussions with family, friends and colleagues will help to spread the word about the potential of education for sustainable development.
Please do share your thoughts and actions with us by email or on social media and help spreading the word by starting discussions about these crucial educational issues.
WELL-BEING – How to turn eco-anxiety into action?!
There is a particular kind of silence that has started to appear in classrooms. It does not come from a lack of interest. Nor from distraction. It appears, quite often, right after the moment something becomes too real.
A graph is shown. A question is asked. A connection is made. And then: nothing.
Not because there is nothing to say, but because too many things arrive at once.
We have become rather good at naming this experience: climate, or eco-anxiety. A term that travels quickly, settles easily and seems to explain what is happening.
But I wonder whether finding a term that grabs our feeling has also made it slightly too convenient.
Because once something is called anxiety, the next questions tend to follow almost automatically: How do we reduce it? How do we make it manageable? How do we move past it?
In education, this question often leads in two familiar directions. We perhaps try to counterbalance. We introduce hope, solutions and success stories, hoping that these will steady the emotional weight. We look for examples that reassure, narratives that resolve, pathways that appear clear enough to follow.
Or we try to contain. We simplify. We soften. We avoid going too far so that things do not become overwhelming. We keep discussions at a level where they can still be comfortably held.
Both responses are understandable. And yet, both quietly assume that the feeling itself is the problem.
But what if it isn’t? What if the difficulty is not that students feel too much negativity, but that there is nowhere for that feeling to go? What if the real challenge is not emotional intensity, but the absence of structures that allow that intensity to move?
At SEEd, we often encounter young people who are not disengaged from sustainability, but already deeply connected to it.
They are thinking about it.
They are feeling it.
They are, in many ways, already involved.
The question is not how to make them care. It is how to help that care turn into action.
One way to think about this is not in terms of reducing anxiety, but in terms of redirecting it. Not away from the issue, but into relationship, action and reflection.
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First:
from holding it alone to holding it together.
When sustainability is approached as an individual responsibility, it can become heavy very quickly. Questions begin to accumulate without resolution: What should I do? Is it enough? Does it even matter?
But when these questions are brought into a shared space – spoken, listened to, reflected upon – the experience changes.
In our Educator Changemakers CPD, this often begins with something simple, but not easy: creating space where uncertainty is allowed to remain present. Where questions are not rushed. Where emotional responses are not treated as obstacles to learning, but as part of it.
This requires a subtle shift in the role of the educator. Not towards providing answers,
but towards holding the conditions in which questions can deepen.
Second:
from knowing about to working within.
There is a point at which understanding no longer feels empowering, but distancing. The more we know, the more complex the picture becomes and the harder it is to locate ourselves within it.
In our Young Changemakers programme, students begin not with solutions, but with concerns that feel real to them. They explore these through inquiry, dialogue and action.
They speak to others.
They gather perspectives.
They test ideas that may or may not work.
What becomes visible is not a neat outcome, but a process. Students begin to describe change differently. Not as something that happens elsewhere, or at scale, but as something that unfolds through interaction, adaptation and persistence.
They begin to understand not only what might change,
but how change happens. And in that shift, something else changes too: their sense of position. They are no longer standing outside the issue, looking in. They are already within it.
Third:
from reacting to shaping.
There comes a moment when participation leads to another kind of question.
Not only what can I do?, but also why is it like this?
Why are certain decisions made the way they are? Whose voices are heard, and whose are not? How might this be different?
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Across all of this, a pattern begins to emerge. Eco-anxiety does not diminish when we look away from it. Nor does it disappear when we try to resolve it too quickly. It changes when it is given direction.
When it is shared.
When it is connected to action.
When it becomes part of an ongoing conversation rather than a closed experience.
This is why SEEd’s work does not begin with answers, but with relationships. Between students and teachers. Between schools and communities. Between learning and lived experience.
Because sustainability education is not only about understanding the world. It is about finding ways to remain in relationship with it, especially when that relationship becomes difficult.
So perhaps wellbeing, in this context, is not about feeling better. It is not about replacing anxiety with optimism, or certainty, or reassurance. It may be something more demanding;and more sustaining.
The capacity to stay with what is difficult. To remain engaged without needing immediate resolution. To act, even when outcomes are unclear. Not alone, but together.
