Last week we caught up with Kate McBain, consultant and course director in transdisciplinary practices at BIMM Univeristy. The plans for us to collaborate on a performance with the Pirates of the Carabina have been coming along nicely. Together we will provide interactive activities for all participants at the AoMo conference held in Nancy, France 2024. Our aim is to provide a space where art interacts with presentation, through storytelling and narratives of different perspectives through art installations. Activities and workshops that facilitate performing arts, sound installations and storytelling functions will be provided. The main activity will be via a circus “Taxi” that allows for narratives to be shared. Participants can tell their stories inside a taxi that will be transmitted by video for the audience to view. Sound installations will provide participants a chance to listen to the stories.
We also had the pleasure of presenting the project at a workshop with lecturers at the Univeristy of Gothenburg this week. The dialogue opened up with the recognition that lecturers across universities experience similar challenges of resistance, lack of resources and support to develop ideas when applying sustainability education. Those that understand sustainability as a holistic and interdisciplinary science consider sustainability must be taught, since providing knowledge is the purpose of education. The whole student approach to education helps develop a holistic mindset that can tackle the challenges faced, through the mindset of sustainability as a science.
We also discussed the great need to build a community for sustainability education beyond the university boundaries. The challenges we face to help provide knowledge for present and future encounters needs a collaborative force from all stakeholders; schools, organisations and individuals ready to take the next step. We would like to thank Eddie Omrcen head of the section for Sustainability, Johan Boman senior advisor for the section for Sustainability and Kassahun Weldemariam lecturer for the Didactics in Science and Technology Education at Gothenburg University. Your enthusiasm and persistence in this work provide great energy. We look forward to further dialogue and continued collaboration in the near future.
Finally, we also met with Simon Werbart Flato, business manager at Sustainergies, a non-profit organisation based in Stockholm that supports students through the provision of services in sustainability work. Simon reached out to us to have a dialogue about how we can collaborate with the sustainability mindset map to help match students to careers in sustainability work. Working with organisations to collaborate during training sessions, case projects and other workshops helps provide students with the experience of real-life sustainability challenges. We thank Simon for his support and insight into the practical application of putting knowledge into action.
This week’s reflection questions: Which transformative practices from across disciplines have you found inspiring? Would you like to become a part of a community for sustainability education that transfers into practice? Which real-life sustainability challenges that you have experienced could be supported by such a community?
P.s. If you would like to take part in a dialogue with us and many like-minded people, we will be gathering in Umeå on the 22-23rd of February 2024 at a symposium for sustainability competences in education. Find out more here.
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