The downfall of humanity at the hands of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a common sci-fi trope. From Skynet in ‘Terminator’ to Asimov’s I, Robot, things never seem to end well when humans and AI cross paths. While tales of AI breaking their programming and going rogue may be a bit fanciful, there is a dark side to our ever-expanding use of technology that demands our attention now. In this article, we are going to discuss the environmental impact of the technologies we use and how we, as educators, might engage sustainably with technology.
The hidden price of progress
The environmental impact of technological progress has come under scrutiny for a number of years (Selwyn 2024). Each new device relies on the mining of rare earth minerals and other non-renewable resources such as plastics and petrochemicals. This is further compounded by the exploitation of workers in developing countries who extract these resources.
Beyond the depletion of our natural resources, technology is inextricably linked to the impending climate crisis. Many recent technologies are responsible for staggering levels of emissions. Bitcoin, just one of the many cryptocurrencies, is responsible for energy consumption roughly equivalent to that of Poland (Digiconomist, 2025). Moreover, AI models can consume ten times more power than a similar request made via Google (Vries, 2023).
When it comes to AI specifically, its sustainability challenges extend beyond environmental impact, raising serious concerns about equity, labour, and long-term societal consequences. For example, how can we create a sustainable society where people are able to flourish if AI is set to eliminate many jobs?
Addressing sustainability as educators
This may seem a bit overwhelming. With such large systemic problems, what can we do as educators? While the issue is multifaceted, this article highlights two ways we can start to address it.
Community organising and co-creation
As Grünberger (2023) highlights, the progress we receive is not necessarily the progress anybody asked for; it’s the decision of a few powerful people, often chasing financial goals.
For many authors (Markauskaite et al., 2023; Grünberger, 2023; Selwyn, 2024), one of the ways to oppose this is a focus on community and co-creation. It’s important that we come together and agree on what is actually important to us. What is progress that we want to embrace, and what technologies insert themselves negatively in the educational process?
As Selwyn (2024) notes, the idea here is not to abstain from using technology or to reject progress but rather a refocusing on what is actually important and beneficial for the communities where technology is enacted. This may lead us to question some of our base assumptions around technologies that are an everyday part of academia. For example, does Turnitin actually align with our values? Is it beneficial for learning? Morris and Stommel (2017) would suggest not…
While we may cast aside technologies that do not fit with our vision, Selwyn (2024) also suggests a focus on technologies that are accessible, durable, easily maintained or repaired, and adapted. While there has been more focus on this within the technology sector, with easily repairable tech like the Framework Laptop or the Fair Phone being produced, this is still not common practice. Platforms are usually locked down and obscured to protect intellectual property. Capabilities are limited to the ‘intended’ purpose, regardless of what the hardware is actually capable of. This reality is why community engagement and co-creation are such powerful tools for sustainability. For example:
- Could the expertise with Queen Mary allow us to run community-oriented workshops to help those living and working in East London fix their broken tech?
- Could taking a co-created interdisciplinary approach allow us to do more with the technology we have?
Efforts such as these would all have a positive impact on the sustainability of our technology use.
When it comes to the question of AI, as a community we can decide which kinds of AI we want to embrace and how we want to do so. Iliada Eleftheriou’s AI code of conduct, for example, is a good case study of co-created standards coming out of the University of Manchester. But we could take this further as discussed below.
Pedagogies of sustainability
Just as co-creation empowers communities to shape technological engagement, we must also consider how educational practices and curricula can reflect and reinforce these sustainable values. Here we might turn to ecopedagogies (Markauskaite et al., 2023), such as posthuman pedagogies (Cielemęcka and Daigle, 2019; Jeong et al., 2021; Copeland et al., 2023). Ecopedagogies is an umbrella term for approaches that, amongst other things, “invite combinations of multiple perspectives, as well as different knowledges and ways of knowing (e.g., Indigenous and Western knowledge)” (Markauskaite et al., 2023, p. 187).
Posthumanism, for example, recognises the ways in which human, non-human, environmental and technological actors are deeply entangled. This has proved a useful philosophy in the context of sustainability. As Jeong et al. (2021) note, science education has long separated humans from our environment but a posthuman approach encourages “thinking beyond the binary framing of humanity versus nature and [instead] conceiving of humans as already interconnected within nature” (p. 811).
These pedagogies urge us and our students to consider the role of technology “beyond their immediate instrumental purposes” (Markauskaite et al., 2023, p. 187). If we were to build on the work of Iliada Eleftheriou mentioned above, we might consider what a posthuman AI code of conduct would look like. Such a code of conduct would reach beyond the university and consider how our interactions with AI are embedded in wider environmental systems and the impacts that this might have.
Conclusion
Markauskaite et al. (2023) suggest that for a sustainable university, we need to reenvision the teacher's role to emphasise gathering people in co-creation and supporting our students in unpacking multiple perspectives around technology. As educators, we have a unique opportunity to lead on sustainability: by embedding sustainability into how we teach, the tools we choose, and the communities we build.
References
Cielemęcka, O. and Daigle, C. (2019) ‘Posthuman Sustainability: An Ethos for our Anthropocenic Future’, Theory, Culture & Society, 36(7–8), pp. 67–87. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419873710.
Copeland, K. et al. (2023) ‘Posthuman pedagogy: experiential education for an era of mutualism’, Environmental Education Research, 29(10), pp. 1443–1459. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2023.2227783.
Grünberger, N. (2023) ‘Participation as a Key Principle of Education for Sustainable Development in the Postdigital Era’ in Weich, A. and Macgilchrist, F. (eds) (2023) Postdigital Participation in Education: How Contemporary Media Constellations Shape Participation. Cham: Springer Nature (Palgrave Studies in Educational Media).
Jeong, S., Sherman, B. and Tippins, D.J. (2021) ‘The Anthropocene as we know it: posthumanism, science education and scientific literacy as a path to sustainability’, Cultural Studies of Science Education, 16(3), pp. 805–820. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-021-10029-9.
Markauskaite, L., Carvalho, L. and Fawns, T. (2023) ‘The role of teachers in a sustainable university: from digital competencies to postdigital capabilities’, Educational technology research and development, 71(1), pp. 181–198. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-023-10199-z.
Morris, S.M. and Stommel, J. (2017) A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin, Hybrid Pedagogy. Available at: https://hybridpedagogy.org/resisting-edtech/ (Accessed: 16 April 2025).
Selwyn, N. (2024) ‘Digital degrowth: toward radically sustainable education technology’, Learning, Media and Technology, 49(2), pp. 186–199. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2159978.
Vries, A. de (2023) ‘The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence’, Joule, 7(10), pp. 2191–2194. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.09.004.