​​University instruction is often framed as an entirely cognitive activity. But emotions are integral to learning, as well as to how people respond to questions of justice, care, and fairness. This affects ourselves, other people, and entities other than humans. Roland Tormey looks at how scholarship of the last thirty years has shifted from ‘conventional’ to more ‘critical’ views of emotion in learning. He examines how emotions like compassion, guilt, shame, ecoanxiety, outrage, embarrassment, and frustration have been found to arise when teaching sustainability topics in higher education. Since emotion is already integral to learning, and ignoring it won’t make it go away, a number of teaching strategies are useful to integrate emotion into sustainability education. These include: strategies to develop students’ emotional awareness and language; the explicit inclusion of emotions such as compassion in case studies and classroom examples; explicit foregrounding of problem-solving and group work methods when addressing sustainability topics; and strategies for reducing ecoanxiety in sustainability learning. These teaching approaches are simple enough to be tried by all teachers, even those who feel they do not have much expertise in emotion.