ESD Exchange aims to offer a much-needed space for sharing practice, research or experience relating to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Green Skills in Higher Education, and a chance to take part in conversations about issues that matter for this work.
Who is the event for?
The event is for you if you are:
- A university staff member seeking to share or hear about teaching and learning practice
- An academic or research student looking to disseminate relevant research on ESD and Green Skills
- A university lead on green skills or sustainability, looking to influence strategy at your institution, the higher education sector and beyond
- A student with a strong interest in these issues looking to share your experiences and shape the dialogue
- Professionals with an interest in how ESD and Green Skills are developed within HE.
- Any one else keen to join the conversation!
We aim to gather both a national/international audience and offer relevant opportunities for involvement for students and staff from the three host universities.
Themes for Contributions
Many sessions at the conference will be organised by theme, with contributions informing facilitated dialogue around issues that matter to participants. We have noted several potential themes for contributions below, but we welcome anything and everything that participants see as relevant for sharing or discussing.
- Engaging and Effective Teaching and Learning: What is working well? A space to share initiatives in the classroom or beyond for staff and/or students. Also a chance to share and reflect on initiatives that didn’t work as planned.
- Green Skills and purpose-driven careers: How should the concept of ‘Green Skills’ be understood and put into practice within universities, alongside related ideas (graduate attributes, sustainability competencies) and to meet the needs of learners, organisations and the public sector?
- Civic engagement on sustainability learning: How can universities effectively support their wider place-based community with learning and action for sustainability. Contributions could explore what practices are working, what policies are supporting and driving this and more.
- Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence tools are disrupting teaching and learning practices in higher education, will likely have a large impact on future careers, bring a range of tangible benefits but also significant challenges around the ethics and environmental impact of their development. How should ESD and Green Skills practice engage with AI in this context?
- Decolonising, Equity and Inclusion: How does the ESD agenda and practice engage with social inequity, inclusivity and the underlying socio-cultural and economic factors driving this? How does ESD reflect the priorities and contexts for learners and societies across the globe?
- Strategy, processes, leadership: In the current context of higher education and recent post-16 white paper in the UK, what are key challenges and opportunities for systemic change in support of ESD? How is ESD and work on Green Skills supported by the likes of the Teaching Excellence Framework, academic quality assurance processes, course accrediting bodies and more?
- Monitoring and Evaluating ESD: How can institutions, educators and learners best understand the impacts of ESD practice within the taught curriculum and beyond, over the short and long term? How can monitoring and evaluating also serve to motivate, engage and support learning?
- Future of ESD: In the context of global changes to higher education, accelerating changes to the earth’s climate and political polarisation, what are the priorities for ESD? Is ‘ESD’ as a concept still fit for purpose for the transformative action-learning agenda it aims to support?
These are a range of relevant themes and provocations, but all contributions are welcome. We will aim to cluster contributions together around purpose-driven sessions wherever possible, including themes that emerge from the received submissions.
Session types and type of Contribution
We are inviting contributions as either:
- Presentations (10-15mins)
- Lightning Talks (5-7 mins)
- Workshops (40 mins)
You can also use the call for contributions form to highlight issues/questions/provocations/themes which are important to you which you’d like to see explored through a session at the event.
The organising team will actively convene the event so that sessions are purpose-driven around a common theme or challenge, drawing on contributions and facilitation to enable an engaging dialogue. We will also run some sessions with a diverse range of practice or research-based presentations or two complementary workshops.
We aim to find space for as many submitted contributions as is feasible; this may mean that you are offered a shorter presentation slot, or the chance to present at a webinar session rather than at the in-person event.
Finally, we are designing the event with a developmental focus, which includes other dissemination opportunities.
- For academic submissions, we are also offering the chance to produce an Extended Abstract which will be published online with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
- For any contribution, we also welcome blog posts linked to your contribution, which we can publish on the conference website and disseminate on social media.
- We aim to identify academic journals which can provide a follow-on publishing opportunity linked to contributions from the event.
Submit your Contribution Ideas
Please use the online form link below to submit your proposed contributions. This could be a talk or workshop or just the ideas you’d like to discuss at the event.
We would particularly welcome issues and contributions where the session outputs can feed directly into policy/consultation/etc to have an impact beyond the event.
ESD Exchange 2026 – Submit Conference Participation Submissions
To help you to prepare your submission, an editable Word document is available to download and view. We suggest using this for drafting purposes and to keep a copy for future reference. [Note – we have had reports of the file not downloading with some internet browsers. Please change browser if needed.]
The deadline for submissions is noon on Tuesday 24th February 2026, with decisions on participation shared over the following 7 days.
Note that Registration to attend will be open through DMU’s Online Shop from mid-February. We welcome early registration from those already committed to attending, which will assist with our bursary allocation process.
If you have an idea, proposal or query that the Participation Submission form can’t capture, please get in touch.
Click here to download the Call for Contributions as a Word document.
[Note – we have had reports of the file not downloading with some internet browsers. Please change browser if needed.]
