This week I was invited to discuss the Erasmus+ project OpenPass4Climate that Dr. Pablo Martín-Ramos at Universidad of Valladolid is working on in collaboration with several European universities. The project explores students’ climate action commitment through open badges aligned with the EU GreenComp framework. The research group is seeking expertise in how to assess student learning experiences and have reached out to ask for advice from the sustainability competence capacity building perspective. This group of interdisciplinary experts has been working on the OpenPass4Climate project for several years now, with participants in higher education and school education. Thank you, Pablo, for an interesting dialogue about your project and what it has achieved so far. I look forward to future collaborations, coming soon.
I also had the pleasure of being facilitator to the Higher Education Didactics for Sustainability course for teachers held in Sweden with participants from many different countries. I am leading the topic on Sustainability Competence and had the pleasure of meeting the new group of participants embarking on the immersive experience of problem-based learning on the HEDS course. This week we welcomed Dr. Katja Brundiers at the University of Freiburg, Germany, to share her experiences working with sustainability competencies to help build capacities to act within community projects. Katja is part of a large Research Group in Transformational Sustainability Science that works with teaching and research projects.
We had a dialogue about building capacity in sustainability competence through transdisciplinary collaborations in local communities. Katja presented her experience on a project in Arizona, USA, where people with different roles in the community had identified a sustainability challenge: heat without the shade needed to cool down. A diverse group of community leaders, park rangers, legal representatives, local council workers, and many more were involved in the project. They anticipated that more shaded areas would be needed, since the climate in Arizona is getting hotter. To implement the strategies that they had designed, the community required collaboration, resilience, and drive to co-create transdisciplinary knowledge. Applying the key sustainability competencies is a complex problem-solving process, and transdisciplinary collaborations can provide the support to implement transformation in society.
The dialogue with participants on the HEDS course provided a great example of how a project like this one in Arizona could be adapted to an educational environment. Some challenges about implementing such activities in formal education mentioned by the participants included the space to provide such activities in the traditional lecture format. We discussed how collaboration across disciplines could help support constructive alignment with classroom activities and the curriculum of a course or program. Another common challenge that was brought up was when participants or students didn’t agree with the values of a framework (for example, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals or the concept of sustainable development). Some suggested that a different approach might help to overcome this challenge, such as taking the intrapersonal perspective and instead asking participants what they care about. Thank you Katja for sharing your insights in transformative learning approaches in education.
Can you identify a challenge in your neighbourhood that you care about? How can you implement transformations to address this challenge? Could you pool resources from across disciplines, from external knowledge sources, or across teacher groups in the same program?
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