This week Gert-Olof visited the FEKIS conference in Sweden to present our project. Experiences were shared and future participation was requested by fellow ESDers. A teacher reflected over the real-life work experience students participate in to learn from organisations connected to the discipline they major in on their study programs. The students are tasked with reflecting on sustainability aspects of the work done in the organisations.

The teachers are now working on how to find out how well the students learn for sustainability and have planned to interview the students to gain the students’ perspective. We have suggested that the Sustainability Competence Assessment tool could be a compliment to their interviews, since the questionnaire can assess the students before they begin the experience and after the work placement has been conducted. The teachers show great engagement with this work and future collaborations both with the practical aspects and research about assessments have been discussed. Thank you for sharing your work.

We also talked with future teachers of the programs we are following, to present the class’ Sustainability Competence Assessment results and what steps to take next. We discussed the competencies and teaching activities that could be taken and reflected over how to engage the students in the process of this learning progression approach to education for sustainability. The teachers have been inspired by the possibilities this support system can bring and have begun to send in their plans and experiences in previous class activities with education for sustainability in their disciplines. The activities will be updated on our website soon.

Some very useful feedback was also shared with us from a consultant specialist in measuring capacity in the workplace. Our work with developing the Sustainability Competence Assessment tool involves adapting the questionnaire for different contexts. We discussed how measuring the sustainability competencies in organisations may require a different psycholinguistic approach as well as a different measurement approach. Exploring these ideas with people who have many years of experience with surveys in non-academic environments has been very helpful and has shown us how engaged many are in improving learning for sustainability in action.