Sustainable Teaching: Why We Design for Students But Not for Ourselves

Part 1 of a three-part series on passion, pedagogy, and what it asks of us. Drawing on a recent chapter in Sustainability Teaching for Impact (Routledge, 2025) and ongoing collaborative work on educator (dis)comfort and joy.

Nobody warns you about the tiredness. Not the marking tiredness or the too-many-meetings tiredness, but the kind that comes from spending three hours being fully present with a room full of people while they work through something that matters. The tiredness that lives in your chest, not your eyes.

If you teach in ways that involve the whole person, if you use creative methods, embodied work, applied drama, collaborative storytelling, you know this feeling. You've sat in your car afterwards needing ten minutes before you can drive. You've wondered, privately, whether you're cut out for this. I want to name that, because the silence around it makes it feel like a personal failing. It isn't.

What relational teaching actually takes

I've been thinking about this since writing a chapter with Tony Wall, Eva Österlind, Laura Dixon, and Dave Soehren for the Routledge book Sustainability Teaching for Impact. The chapter explores applied drama and performance in higher education, and one of its most honest sections is about energy: what interactive, embodied pedagogy demands of the people who facilitate it.

This kind of teaching runs on presence. You're holding the room, reading energy, making constant decisions about when to push and when to pull back, watching for the student who's withdrawing, the pair who've hit something real, the moment an exercise tips from productive discomfort into something else entirely. All while staying in your own body, managing your own responses, keeping the whole thing moving. That's a lot of invisible work, and the timetable doesn't distinguish between a lecture and a three-hour applied drama session. The workload model certainly doesn't.

In the chapter, we explore some practical responses to this. One is what we call 'facilitator mode': being deliberately present as yourself without performing a role, bringing high presence but with boundaries, so you're not trying to be the most active person in the room. The hard work happens in the preparation, then we step back and let participants carry the experience while we observe, guide, and intervene when needed. There's also the question of rhythm, of spacing out interventions to find a flow that sustains you and your students, and the team question of whether you can share the facilitation so one person isn't carrying it all.

Most of us design sessions around the learning outcomes and forget entirely to design for our own sustainability in delivering them. We'll talk about sustainable business, sustainable systems, sustainable development goals, but the sustainability of the people doing the teaching rarely makes the list.

The bit nobody writes about

Facilitator mode, rhythm, shared facilitation: these are real strategies and they matter. But I think the hardest energy cost isn't the facilitation itself. It's the emotional labour of the decisions you make inside it.

I've been in sessions where something surfaces that needs challenging: an offhand comment, a pattern of behaviour, a moment where the room reveals something about itself that can't just be moved past. In those moments you face a choice between stepping into the discomfort or keeping things comfortable. I've written before about working in the cracks, about the daily choices that create room for questions the curriculum doesn't anticipate. What I want to say more about here is what those choices cost. For those of us who teach through warmth and connection, who've built our sense of being good at this on being liked, stepping in is a particular kind of exposure. It means risking the relationships you've worked hard to build, being the person who stops the room, who names what's happening, who holds people accountable. You're spending something you can't easily get back.

But not stepping in costs something too. I know from my own practice that the times I've chosen comfort over challenge, the times I've let something pass because I didn't want to be the one standing alone, those moments have taught me more about what care actually requires than any reading on feminist pedagogy. Care isn't warmth. Care, sometimes, is the willingness to make a room uncomfortable because the alternative is worse.

When you do step in, when you name the thing and hold the space, what follows is often deeper, more connected, more real than anything that came before. Students have told me that those moments of challenge gave them permission to be honest, to share their own experiences, to engage with the material as something that actually touches their lives. The joy in that is extraordinary, and it comes directly from the discomfort. I don't think those two things are separable. The sessions that cost me most as a facilitator have consistently been the ones that produced the richest learning, and I've started to think that's not a coincidence but a relationship we need to understand better.

If care is curriculum, if how we show up in the room is part of what we're teaching, then the question isn't how to avoid the cost. It's how to make it sustainable. The chapter offers real strategies for real classrooms. But underneath the practical advice sits a harder truth. If we believe that passionate, relational, embodied teaching matters, we have to take seriously what it costs the people who do it, and build that into how we plan, how we support each other, and how we talk about what good teaching actually involves.

This is something I'm exploring from two directions. Through the Joy Index project, student interns are mapping where moments of intellectual aliveness happen in teaching, the student side of when learning comes alive. And alongside colleagues, I'm working on the educator side of that question: how teachers experience (dis)comfort and joy in those same charged moments, what those moments demand of us, and what makes the difference between a moment that depletes and one that, despite its cost, leaves something behind worth having. Two companion inquiries, both trying to understand what happens when learning moves people, from both sides of the room.

I don't think we talk about this enough. The cost and the joy, tangled together, and what it means to keep choosing the work anyway. That's what passion in pedagogy actually looks like. Not enthusiasm. Commitment, sustained over a career, in institutions that weren't built for it.

This is the first in a three-part series exploring themes from: Wall, T., Williams, S.J., Österlind, E., Dixon, L., & Soehren, D. (2025). Future developments to embrace a 'pedagogy of passion'. In Sustainability Teaching for Impact. Routledge. Open access under CC BY licence.

Next: Letting People Choose Their Way In