Hopeful Approaches to Teaching and Learning Environmental 'Wicked Problems'

"Wicked problems" are complex to understand and challenging to teach. Our experience of teaching about environmental concerns in Aotearoa New Zealand suggests how these concepts are taught is more important for student learning than the nature of wicked problems themselves. By offering opportunities for students to co-develop their own situated knowledges about wicked problems, they can conceptualise and tackle them more effectively at their own pace and in their own experiential contexts. Here we identify and discuss approaches to teaching and learning that can be effectively applied to any wicked problem. We demonstrate a hopeful way to teach and learn about unwieldy and overwhelming issues that many of today's undergraduates will inevitably be expected to confront in the future. This paper provides a framework to engage students in a course, and tools for engendering active participation in situated and tangible learning experiences when teaching wicked problems. As lecturers teaching in a School of Environment in the disciplinary areas of geography, environmental science, science communication, and sustainability, we discuss the value and applications of these ideas across three levels of undergraduate teaching. We identify challenges that we have experienced and show how it is possible to turn these challenges into opportunities.