In this paper we study a course on Issues in Social and Educational Research run for first year master’s international students at the University of Iceland, School of Education. The course was used to pilot the Helsinki Principles developed by the ActSHEN project. During the project, we found that we needed to justify the “sustainability” dimension of our course because of the lack of an explicit sustainability content. Our response was that sustainability education should not be defined in terms of sustainability content but by the intention of the pedagogical approach, which needs to be transformative in nature (Gollifer and Wilson, 2016). However, our focus on pedagogy alone has led us to neglect "the ability to identify system characteristics that may encourage sustainable and unsustainable behaviours” (ActSHEN Project Group, 2016). Transformative pedagogy is commonly referenced in relation to sustainability education as a way of conceiving and practising educational forms that ‘take us to the depth of things’ (Sterling, 2011:18) to find ways to respond to “wicked problems” (Ferkany & Powys Why, 2011). We created pedagogical spaces characterised by collaborative pedagogy to generate what we refer to as "student ownership of student influence” as representative of transformational learning. The pedagogy not only "takes us to the depth of things" but also serves to form multidisciplinary partnerships to respond to wicked problems. In the process, we began to recognise institutional unsustainable behaviours that fail to support the potential of these partnerships. In our presentation, we first explain our pedagogical approach defined as "student ownership of student influence” by drawing on examples from the Issues in Social and Educational Research course run in the autumn of 2015/2016 and 2016/2017. We use these to illustrate the contradictions between the University of Iceland’s sustainability policy rhetoric and its current governance and support systems and structures. We conclude by revisiting our understanding of sustainability education as the intention of the pedagogical approach in a classroom setting to expand this to the need to be prepared to work with the impact of transformational learning in a way that extends beyond individual student’s capacity for informed decision making within the classroom setting or within the public sphere that students operate. As educators aiming for institutional change that encourages and supports sustainable behaviours, our challenge then becomes how to respond to this recognition in the institutions in which we work.

ActSHEN Project Group (2016). ActSHEN: Action for Sustainability in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://blogs.helsinki.fi/action-for-sustainability/ Gollifer, S. and Wilson, C. (2016). Working with sustainable education a convention university course. Available for download at ActSHEN Project Group (2016). ActSHEN: Action for Sustainability in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://blogs.helsinki.fi/action-for-sustainability/ Ferkany, M and Powys Whyte, K. (2011). The Importance of Participatory Virtues in the Future of Environmental Education in J Agric Environ Ethics DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9312-8, Springer Science+Business Media B.V.