It’s not surprising that Samantha Lindgren has a passion for environmental and sustainability education.

“One of my earliest memories is driving a truckload of recyclables that my family had been saving to an industrial recycling center before residential recycling was available,” says Lindgren, an assistant professor in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership at the College of Education. “My dad is an environmental engineer, and these types of principles were just part of my upbringing.”

Before joining the College in 2013 as a coordinator of STEM teacher development and later being hired as an assistant professor in 2020, Lindgren focused on environmental problem-solving as a science teacher and wrote environmentally focused science curricula geared toward fifth and sixth graders for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

Expanding Her Reach

From that beginning, Lindgren has greatly expanded her reach in environmental and sustainability education. Her work spans:

• conducting international projects and creating partnerships in countries such as Namibia and Bangladesh,
• improving public climate literacy through education projects in the U.S.,
• studying preservice teacher education regarding their sustainability education preparation,
• creating a general education course that focuses on climate hope rather than anxiety, and
• designing an online and on-campus sustainability education graduate certificate in the College, which is in the final stages of campus approval and is hoped to be launched during the 2025-26 academic year.

Partnerships in Namibia ...

Those equity issues are most evident in the Global South, where Lindgren has centered her international work.

“My work abroad focuses on young people and women in household energy and sustainable agricultural contexts,” she says.

Several of these projects have taken place in Namibia, a country on the west coast of Southern Africa. Namibia, an impoverished country with high unemployment rates and one of the world’s highest income disparity rates because of its apartheid past, is the driest nation in sub-Saharan Africa.

“I have a longstanding partnership with a sustainability education NGO in Namibia, which is where I did my dissertation research,” she says. “I’m evaluating how children in Namibia are interpreting sustainability education and making changes in their lives. I’ve worked on a number of projects with this NGO, primarily around the evaluation of sustainability education programming for children in Namibia and the extent to which it influences their parents’ decision-making in the home.”

Lindgren hopes to conduct a longitudinal comparative study of teachers and students in the U.S. and Namibia.

“Sustainability is part of Namibia’s constitution, and sustainability education is a nationwide mandate that they take very seriously,” she says. “I’d like to do a comparative study between the two countries. For instance, we often say that if we educate our children and their teachers then better climate change outcomes will follow. However, no one’s actually done the work yet to follow teachers to see if we train them, do they actually teach it in their classrooms, and if they do, does it make a difference for their students. I’d like to take up that work.”

... and Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, Lindgren collaborated with colleagues at the Bangladesh Agricultural University on a needs assessment and trainings of rural female farmers.

“Initially, we wanted to see what the women needed in order to make their farms more sustainable,” she explains. “We asked if they had training or equipment needs, but it turns out they wanted marketplace literacy. They wanted to learn entrepreneurial skills. So, my colleagues and I developed a course for female farmers that was at the intersection of climate change, poverty, and agriculture, aimed specifically at women in low literacy contexts, to improve their household’s well-being across a several dimensions.”

Female farmers are increasing in numbers in Bangladesh because men have migrated to the cities to look for work, Lindgren notes. “But, until 10 to 15 years ago, there wasn’t educational parity in the country,” she says. “Many women didn’t finish school at the rate they’re finishing now, and literacy rates remain low for adult women. In some places, it still isn’t culturally acceptable for women to engage with men outside of their family units, which means that they are managing their farms by hand even though there are male service providers they could hire to come in with their tractors or harvesters.  So, part of the course focuses on gender norms in communication and ways to work within their constraints, allowing them to access to mechanization in a culturally-appropriate way to improve their farm’s production.”

Improving Climate Literacy in the U.S.

In the U.S., Lindgren is working to improve public climate literacy through education.

“I do that in two ways,” she says. “One, I’m working with nonprofit educational organizations in Illinois to create opportunities for families and households to engage in nature and learn outdoors together.”

For example, she has just wrapped up a project that brought households of middle-school aged children to the forest preserves of Cook County.

“We’ve had a long, multi-year collaboration with them, in part where we created a series of nature notebooks that allow households to learn outdoors at a park or forest preserve of their choosing,” she explains. “The notebooks focus on sustainability and the inquiry practices common to both science, social science, and sustainability education. Data collection from those projects is ongoing, and we’ve made the notebooks publicly available through Google Classroom so that the project can live on through the forest preserves in that way.”

Her second emphasis domestically is centered on strengthening sustainability education in K-12 systems. To that end, she focuses on preservice and in-service teachers.

“I don’t know of any climate change or sustainable education requirement for preservice teachers in any state,” she says, “but we are starting to see states, including Illinois, that are requiring some form of sustainability education in their K-12 standards and mandates.”

In 2024, the state of Illinois passed a bill that requires students to take one unit of sustainability-related content in a science or social studies class before they graduate high school.

“There’s no money attached to that bill, so I am currently looking for ways to fund professional development for Illinois teachers,” Lindgren notes. “But in the meantime, one of my Ph.D. students, Aigul Rakisheva, and I are working with a group of preservice teachers here in the College, piloting a professional development course to see what our current preservice teachers’ baseline understanding of climate change and sustainability is. We are examining whether participation in a training program such as the one we’re piloting with them improve their confidence or their interest in teaching sustainability or climate change in their future classrooms. We hope to secure additional funding to follow these teachers in the next few years to see just what they take into their classrooms.”

Examining Sustainability Education in Universities

Lindgren and Education professor Jon Hale have recently submitted a paper examining colleges of education at the Association of American Universities.

“We wanted to examine the extent to which sustainability education exists in colleges of education at the most prestigious universities in North America,” she says. “The answer is almost not at all.”

It’s a field, Lindgren notes, that has long been led by smaller universities and liberal arts colleges.

“Yet, something like 9,000 teachers come out of colleges of education from AAU institutions each year, so there’s an enormous potential impact if colleges of education step up and join transdisciplinary climate solutions,” she says, adding that she and Hale made recommendations for how colleges of education can engage in future-oriented approaches to education that support climate change efforts.

Understanding the Role of the Global North

To be part of the solution, though, teachers (and all people) need to understand the role the Global North has played in climate change, Lindgren says.

“In the U.S. and in the West, we might not think about the ways that our lifestyle might impact other people around the world,” she explains. “Because we’re a wealthy country, we have been burning fossil fuels at a much higher rate and have been emitting more carbon dioxide emissions per person than anyone else in the world. But the people who are experiencing the impacts of climate change, like drought and desertification and food insecurity, are people in the Global South, in some of the most vulnerable places in the world. So, there’s an equity issue there. Climate change is also related to capitalism and colonialism, and while we sometimes think of these things as all being separate, really it’s all part of the same system, and a symptom of a larger problem.”

For those reasons, Lindgren says, preservice teachers need to understand the mechanisms of climate change, such as the greenhouse effect. “But it’s also as important, if not more important, to understand the social and cultural impacts of our decision-making in the U.S. and what that means for others who bear the brunt of our decision-making. I see sustainability education as an equity issue, broadly.”

Creating a Climate Hope Course

Lindgren is doing her part to help preservice teachers and other students understand the issues surrounding climate change. She is submitting an undergraduate general education course proposal for a class on education and climate emotions, particularly hope, to both educate preservice teachers and other students and allay their anxiety about the climate through hopeful, solutions-based approaches.

“Dean [Chrystalla] Mouza has been a champion of creating some undergraduate courses on sustainability,” Lindgren says. “She’s the one who suggested that I create a general education course to bring students from across campus into the College of Education.”

At the Forefront of Sustainability Education

Both EPOL and the College of Education have been very supportive of Lindgren’s efforts in sustainability education—as has campus, Lindgren notes. This April, the College hosted a Climate and Sustainability Education Summit to discuss curricular and education policy initiatives across the University of Illinois System to address climate change. 

“The College of Education is situated at the forefront of sustainability education,” she says. “We’re approaching it a bit differently than our peer institutions. Our equity and human rights focus separates us from a lot of our peer institutions, which often take a science education focus.

“Our approach should have a broad appeal to both teachers and policymakers. We’re carving out our own space in a growing field, and I hope that we can stay out front.”

Helping the Next Generation

It all goes back to those formative years when Lindgren was growing up in the great outdoors in Minnesota.

“I remember learning about deforestation when I was in elementary and middle school, and I remember hearing that it would be up to my generation to solve climate change,” she says. “And yet, here I am, and my generation has not, in fact, solved climate change—it’s actually much worse now, and we’re shifting this burden onto the next generation, which includes my own children.

“I am motivated to do what I can to mitigate and diminish this problem as much as I can through education, so that it’s less of a lift for the younger generation as they take up the challenge.”