To promote and develop education for sustainability in higher education participants from several institutions across the Nordic countries participated in the three-year project ActSHEN— Action for Sustainability in Higher Education in the Nordic region. This symposium discusses the learning we experienced while carrying out the project.

 The s-word:

The thesaurus on the researcher’s computer says it cannot find any words similar to sustainability, yet around the world the s-word has made its way into school curricula and projects are carried out in relation to this strange phenomenon with even the youngest children.

 Higher education has also taken on this task.

 It was a range of educational issues that brought together a collection of Nordic university teachers and young researchers in 2013. Previously some of us had met in settings related mainly to science education but we wanted to do development work with the magic s-word. Although student initiatives were the declared focus of our project we really had no clear idea then of how or why this would prove to be so significant. Ironically this lack of clarity was exactly what we needed if indeed we were to learn anything. If we had known its value then we would not have needed a project.

The declared goal of the ActSHEN project was to develop a model and guidelines for working with sustainability in higher education with an emphasis on student-driven initiatives (Bernstein, 2000). Now more than three years later we have not developed a model, but we have created a deceptively simple framework as a follow-up to a list of principles. And we have not developed guidelines, but we do have a set of case studies based on the work we did with students. These are as varied as any university education might be.

The stated aim of the project was to investigate ways in which participatory and collaborative education for sustainability can be strengthened in universities. This requires us to walk together, and sometimes separately, down a reflective path. When did our work promote a participatory approach and when was it just talk? Students showed us that they wanted more than a lecture or two on action competence. What could “collaborative education for sustainability” possibly involve? Did this mean a partnership? Did we need to have a common goal? Again students wanted the real thing, not just the s-word.

 In this symposium, which is one step in our reflections on what we learnt and what we know, there are four papers. The first one discusses the collaboration during the project from a point of view of collaborative design. Another looks at the transformation of knowledge in a class of international graduate students and suggests that understanding sustainability is not just about the s-word, but also about the way in which we work. The third one explores the possibilities and challenges encountered when creating space for students to participate in the planning, coordination and development of higher education. In the final paper a slightly different approach to introducing change in the work with students is introduced and the presenter comments on the nature of the project.

Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers