This is the eighth in our series of blog posts showcasing work presented at ESD Exchange. Anje’s session took place on day one of the ESD Exchange conference, on April 16th 2026.
Anje Conradie (A.Conradie@lboro.ac.uk), Foundation Studies, Loughborough University
Most of us learn very early that telling someone something is “good for them” is rarely persuasive.
Small children do not refuse vegetables because they are irrational; they refuse them because vegetables are visible, unfamiliar, and suspicious. So, adults adapt. We hide them. We disguise them. We tell a small lie in the service of a greater good.
When students arrive at university, we often abandon this wisdom entirely.
We label modules “Study Skills”, “Core Skills”, or “Digital Literacy” and then seem surprised when engagement is low. The vegetables are clearly visible, sitting openly on the plate.
This blog is about what happened when we decided to hide them instead.
The problem with “skills modules”
The challenge is a familiar one across higher education. Standalone study‑skills modules often suffer from:
- Low attendance: students believe they already know how to write, research, or work in groups.
- Perceived irrelevance:skills feel generic and disconnected from their disciplinary studies.
- Skills as an ‘add‑on’: separate from subject knowledge rather than integral to learning.
- Surface learning: students do the minimum required to pass.
Wingate (2006) articulated this issue almost two decades ago, arguing that decontextualised study skills encourage compliance rather than learning, and fail to support genuine academic development. Yet despite knowing this, many of us have continued to deliver skills in exactly this way.
So, on the Foundation Year, we asked a different question:
What if students learned the skills precisely at the moment they needed them, and for something that felt meaningful?
Embedding skills where they matter
Our first step was to dismantle the standalone skills module that focused directly on skills. The skills were needed in the long run but not recognised as needed by the students in the moment.
Instead, skills are now:
- Embedded within subject modules, exactly where they are needed
(for example, essay writing, poster design, technical reporting). - Delivered by specialist colleagues, timed alongside coursework.
- Supported by flexible online resources (via VLP), which staff can point to directly in assessment briefs.
The result is not “less skills teaching”, but smarter skills teaching,contextual, purposeful, and visible.
But we still needed a common thread: something that spoke across disciplines, mattered beyond the classroom, and allowed us to embed digital, academic, and collaborative skills without resistance.
That is where Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) came in.
Why Sustainability in Practice?
Loughborough University signed the UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development declaration in 2020, recognising sustainability as a core institutional commitment. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offered us an ideal framework:
- They cut across all disciplines on Foundation; engineering, science, business, humanities, and sport.
- They are real‑world, value‑driven, and future‑focused.
- Critically, they align perfectly with the aims of ESD: enabling learners to make informed decisions and take responsible action.
From an educational perspective, sustainability is not primarily about “green issues”. It is about transformative learning, critical thinking, ethical decision‑making, and agency. In other words: exactly the graduate capacities we hope students will develop.
The module: Sustainability in Practice
Sustainability in Practice is a Foundation Year module designed to “hide the vegetables” such as academic writing, data literacy, collaboration, and digital skills, inside something students genuinely engage with.
Semester 1: Foundations
Students work in interdisciplinary groups, deliberately mixed to reflect how sustainability problems are approached in the real world. Across the semester, they learn to:
- Research the UN SDGs using academic databases and official UN sources (library skills).
- Write and format academic work in Word, including referencing and submission via Turnitin.
- Understand research ethics and academic integrity.
- Manipulate real datasets (such as weather data) using Excel.
- Learn introductory Python by developing simple tools, for example, an app to measure carbon footprint.
- Reflect on how programming and digital tools might feature in their future careers.
Skills are introduced just in time, by specialists, and always embedded within the task students are already working on.
Semester 2: Application
In the second semester, students are set a powerful challenge:
Design an event, project, or digital tool to help the university achieve its sustainability goals.
Their work culminates in a poster conference judged by the Associate Pro Vice‑Chancellor for Sustainability, with the winning team receiving £500 in sustainability vouchers, and the possibility that their idea could be taken forward by the university.
Ideas proposed by students have included:
- Re‑use schemes for household goods between student cohorts.
- Energy‑generating gym equipment and walkways.
- Sustainable transport and lighting solutions on campus.
- Second‑handbook platforms.
- Food‑waste and composting initiatives.
Along the way, they develop:
- Research and evaluation skills.
- Visual communication and poster design.
- Teamwork and project management.
- Confidence in presenting to an authentic audience.
And that is how you hide the vegetables!
By the end of the module, students have:
- Learned how to write, research, analyse data, and work collaboratively.
- Developed digital skills they did not initially believe they needed.
- Engaged critically with sustainability in ways relevant to their disciplines.
- Produced original, creative work with real‑world purpose.
We did not remove skills from the curriculum. We made them unavoidable, and meaningful.
The unexpected outcome?
Students now want to know more.
More applied sustainability. More discipline‑specific relevance. More opportunities to connect their learning to the world beyond university.
And that, perhaps, is the real success of ESD‑informed curriculum design: not telling students what matters but creating learning experiences where they discover it for themselves.
References
Wingate, U. (2006). Doing away with ‘study skills’. Teaching in Higher Education, 11(4), 457–469.
White, R. (2021). Introduction to the ESD Guidance. Sustainability Exchange.
