ESD Exchange Event Part 3 - Teaching with hope and embracing emotions

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 By Ali Riley    

This is the third post of my reflections from the ESD Exchange event held at De Montfort University in April. The first post can be read here, and the second post is here. 

In a recent study (Hickman et al., 2021), 59% of 16-25 year olds who responded to a survey reported that they were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 75% reported that they think the future is frightening. However we also know that despair is dangerous, with fatalistic views undermining behaviour change (Stuart, 2025), so how do we avoid increasing that anxiety? Is there potential to even help reduce it?

Two presentations I attended had strategies to do just that. 

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash 

Hayley Lambert from the University of Birmingham advocated for the use of imagination in learning. In two ESD activities, a bootcamp (Planet Bootcamp) and an interactive exhibition (The Imaginarium), students were introduced to resources that could help them to imagine hopeful futures, including Rob Hopkins’ book How to Fall in Love with the Future (Hopkins, 2025)and the Inner Development Goals. Questions posed for the Imaginarium included ‘What if we all became time travellers?’ and ‘what if we were to take multi-species flourishing seriously’? 

Cathy D’Abreu and Bill Finnegan from Oxford Brookes introduced us to their resource, the Hope Wheel (Finnegan and d’Abreu, 2024). The Hope Wheel directly addresses the absence of attention to the affective domain in Higher Education. We as educators are often under-prepared to address emotions in the classroom - the Hope Wheel offers constructive ways of embedding hope in our pedagogies, guiding students from safe approaches to brave ones, from the self to the world, from the individual to the collective and from situation to solution. I immediately added all these to my ever-growing shelf of resources and writing on hope - to join other writers such as David Orr, Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit.

Some of my favourite books about hope (photo - A. Riley)

In both cases, we were warned that hope is not the same as blind optimism. At the University of Birmingham, students were encouraged to imagine hopeful futures firmly grounded in the possible, and the Hope Wheel emphasises the importance of ‘guardrails’ against climate anxiety. mis/disinformation, and false hope. This, to me, is where research-led teaching offers great tools to demonstrate the art of the possible - what research is happening here at the University of Sheffield that is contributing to a hopeful future, and how can we make sure we tell our students about it, or better yet, get them involved in that research?

"Hope is not the same as blind optimism"

I was left with one final thought about anxiety, emotions and hope, though. Educators themselves are just as likely to experience anxiety about climate change and uncertain futures, so how can we do the work ourselves, alongside our students, to become more hopeful?

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.

Finnegan, W. and d’Abreu, C. (2024) ‘The hope wheel: a model to enable hope-based pedagogy in Climate Change Education’, Frontiers in Psychology, 15. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1347392. 

Hickman, C. et al. (2021) ‘Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey’, The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), pp. e863–e873. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3. 

Hopkins, R. (2025) How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World. Chelsea Green Publishing. 

Stuart, D. (2025) ‘“I have no future” - the critical need to counter climate doomism’, Environmental Sociology, 0(0), pp. 1–12. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2025.2552388. 

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