Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Event reflections part 1

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 By Ali Riley

Back in April, I attended the Education for Sustainable Development ESD) Exchange event held at De Montfort University in Leicester. I was lucky enough to attend a wide variety of thought-provoking discussions on topics ranging from the relationship between AI and ESD, to embracing and supporting emotions about climate change in the classroom. I had the grand intention of summarising every single thing I learned and reflected on in one snappy 700 word blog post but it turns out brevity is not a strength of mine, so I’ve split it into three separate posts about three themes that stood out to me. Think yourself lucky - there are another five or so themes I could have written about! My first post is about AI and ESD.

AI and ESD

A lot of conversation at the event centred on this hot button topic. How do we assess and address the environmental and ethical impacts of AI in education, while still doing what we can to help students to develop the skills they need to be prepared for a future where AI will inevitably be embedded in their working lives?

Photo credit: Taylor Vick on Unsplashed

Secondly, we can support students to use AI critically and responsibly. Romas Malevicius from King’s College London introduced us to the ‘ROCKS think before you prompt’ framework (Toro-Troconis, 2025), which encourages users to work through the following steps when creating their AI prompts:

  1. Role - identify your role
  2. Objective - state your objective
  3. Community - specify your audience
  4. Key - describe tone/style and related parameters
  5. Shape - note the desired form of the output.

Here at The University of Sheffield, we have the excellent resource produced by the University Library which supports students to think critically and responsibly about AI use. Our Common Approach for AI also provides the opportunity to introduce critical thinking about AI into assessments, and is flexible enough to offer ways to minimise the environmental impacts - for example could the module lead produce something that students could critically analyse or respond to, rather than all students generating their own outputs?

Finally, we do need to acknowledge where AI can be a powerful tool. Simon Kemp, from the University of Southampton pointed us towards an opinion piece which states that AI can help 134 SDG targets across the goals to be achieved, but it could also inhibit 59 targets (Vinuesa et al., 2020). It struck me that this could be a really useful learning activity for students to analyse how AI is helping or hindering progress towards particular goals, and you could narrow them down to the goals most relevant to your discipline. The Youtube channel 5 minute papers on AI for the planet could be a useful resource here. It would open up complex critical conversations about when (if ever) the environmental costs of AI can be justified, how resources are allocated in the development of AI, and ethical implications of its use. It would also have the benefit of engaging both those who are sceptical/worried about AI, and those who are enthusiastic and excited about it. This could also be linked to research-led teaching - where is AI making a difference in progress in your discipline and how could you incorporate those case studies into your teaching?



If you would like to explore how to embed ESD in your teaching, a great first step would be to have a look at our Elevate pages on ESD. If you would like to discuss further, or request a workshop/talk in your school, then email us on elevate@sheffield.ac.uk.

Toro-Troconis, M. (2025) ‘Think before you prompt: Reduce your AI carbon footprint with ROCKS’, #ALTC Blog, 15 May. Available here (Accessed: 28 May 2026). 

Vinuesa, R. et al. (2020) ‘The role of artificial intelligence in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals’, Nature Communications, 11(233). Available here

Ali Riley is an Academic Development Advisor in the Elevate Team.