Abstract: When teaching mathematics (or any subject, really), the content we are teaching is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the surface, the content is carried by the examples we choose, the way we frame problems, our interactions with students, and how we talk about our discipline in relation to the world. We always implicitly, and rarely explicitly, communicate what the discipline is for and what it means to act as a future professional in the discipline.

In this seminar, I will start from a question that concerns all university teachers: what kind of learning environment do we want to create, and what kinds of roles do we invite our students to imagine for themselves? While some courses have obvious connections to societal challenges and others do not, we make pedagogical choices that shape students’ sense of agency, responsibility, and belonging. We can model professional behaviour that sets the content in a broader context, discuss the roles the subject plays—directly or indirectly—in addressing complex real‑world questions, and use teaching methods that help all students being heard and taken seriously.

Then, engaging with questions of sustainability does not require adding extra content into a course. It emerges from our efforts to empower students, the value we place on diverse contributions, and our belief that what we all do—inside and beyond the university—can make a difference.

I look forward to exploring these ideas together and discussing concrete ways of teaching mathematics that are both academically rigorous and deeply meaningful for us and our students.

Speaker: Mirjam Glessmer has developed and taught the course “Teaching for Sustainability” at the Centre for Engineering Education at LTH since 2022, and she is one of the co-founders of the initiative “Teaching for Sustainability” at LU. Her main

research interest is in relationships between teachers and students, and how they are influenced by external influences, for example the presence of GenAI. You are very welcome to contact her at mirjam.glessmer@lth.lu.se