Navigating context and complexity: pedagogical insights from environmental assessment teaching

Abstract

Teaching Environmental Assessment (EA) in higher education is both challenging and essential, given its applied, interdisciplinary nature and close connection to evolving practice. While previous studies highlight recurring challenges in EA teaching, such as dispersed course structures, weak links to research, and ambiguities in how EA is positioned within academic programmes, they tend to address these aspects separately rather than as interrelated conditions. Drawing on literature analysis and qualitative interviews with teachers in Sweden and Germany, the study examines what teachers aim to convey, how they teach, and the factors that shape their pedagogical choices. Conceptually, it proposes an analytical framework that integrates teacherrelated, subject-related, student-related, and contextual dimensions, emphasising how teachers perceive and navigate them. In this sense, EA teaching is understood as a navigated practice shaped by how teachers respond to the conditions within which they work. The findings show that EA teaching shares a number of common aims and understandings across countries. Nevertheless, the teaching is also diverse and at times fragile. Teachers' responses to constraints, including limited resources, uneven access to EA knowledge and networks, and context-specific demands, play a central role in shaping what is taught. At the same time, the interdisciplinary nature of EA offers significant opportunities for integrating theory and practice. The study highlights the need to move beyond prescriptive accounts of EA education towards supporting teachers' situated practices and their capacity to make informed pedagogical choices under varying conditions.