The need for sustainable development and societal transformation is gaining more and more relevance and there appears to be a willingness to address the challenge of sustainability transformation (UNESCO, 2014). The broad and complex agenda of education for sustainable development (ESD) (Stevenson, 2007) has great potential to build agency, since it offers manifold opportunities to empower people “to contribute to a better future through mindset changes, critical reflection and building new skills” (Reynolds, 2009, p. 109). Consequently, the Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) makes special mention of inclusive quality education for all and the promotion of lifelong learning (DESA, 2015). Also, the Global Action Programme (GAP) emphasizes “building capacities of educators and trainers” as one of five priority areas (UNESCO, 2014). Nevertheless, ESD is not yet well-established in most countries’ teacher training or professional standards, which in turn may lead to its disregard (Evans et al., 2017).

Deemed essential factors for successful implementation of ESD into school practice are teachers’ competencies and commitment towards sustainability (Barth, 2015; Buchanan, 2012). Therefore, the provision of corresponding offers to train educators is urgently required, underlining the importance of teacher education programs, especially with regards to their impact on beliefs, values, and attitudes of future teachers (Andersson et al., 2013). Adopting Baumert and Kunter’s (2009) general competence model  for the context of ESD, Bertschy et al. (2013) were one of the first to link the discussion about competencies in ESD to the broader discourse on professional competencies of teachers. Taking this a step further, Timm and Barth (2018, under review) related the competence profile of ESD teachers to a distinction of two key action areas in schools – influencing either the micro-level of their own teaching or the macro-level of institutional development.

What is ultimately needed, accordingly, are competent and committed multipliers who act as change agents (Bürgener and Barth, 2018). To do so, these multipliers need the opportunity to develop necessary competencies along their own educational pathways. A research project at Leuphana University Lüneburg focuses the support of experienced teachers, in order to promote the implementation of ESD, both on the micro- and macro-level. Based on the idea of communities of practice (Wenger, 2003), university researchers collaborate with teachers from cooperating schools as well as actors from extracurricular educational institutions. In a transdisciplinary manner, they develop, test, and implement a competence-oriented learning environment as a new learning format in teacher education. Beyond that, they discuss the individual challenges resulting from the implementation of ESD. The diverse specialities of the different actors in teacher education complement each other and help to develop, test and reflect on how teaching in terms of ESD can be put into practice.

Main research question

Focusing the members of the community of practice, the question arises of how this collaboration affects the practitioners (micro-level):

• (How) does the cooperation in the above described community of practice contribute to the implementation of ESD into school practice?

Sub-questions are:

• Which drivers and barriers affect the cooperation?
• What changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes in terms of ESD can be perceived on the part of the practice partners in the community of practice?
• (How) are these changes expressed in school practice?

Focusing the involved institutions behind the participants of the community of practice, the question arises of how this collaboration affects these institutions (macro-level):

• What institutional changes towards a (more) sustainable development can be perceived on the part of the schools involved?

Sub-questions are:

• Which drivers and barriers affect these possible changes?
• (How) are these changes expressed in school practice?

Research takes place in the first half of 2019 at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. In the community of practice, five primary schools, each represented by one or two experienced teachers of the subject “Sachunterricht” (basic social and science studies), four different extracurricular educational institutions (with different thematic focus areas, in order to cover a broad range of interests), each represented by one executive, as well as two researchers from Leuphana University of Lüneburg, work together collaboratively. The members of the community of practice meet once a month to exchange expertise and develop the context of a project seminar for teacher students. In order to work on individual questions and projects, they build tandems of one school and one extracurricular educational institution. Data collection Data will be collected between February and July 2019, following a qualitative case study approach (Yin, 2018) to reveal a detailed picture of how cooperation in the community of practice takes place as well as how it effects single members regarding their attitudes, beliefs, motivations, aspirations and potentially also their practice and the diffusion into the institutions. Apart from audio recordings of the meetings in the community of practice, guided focus groups with members of the community of practice will deliver qualitative data. These focus groups are conducted at three different times over the course of the cooperation. Each focus group discusses the progress of the cooperation, drivers and barriers, possible outcomes and effects on the single tandems as well as on the involved schools. Data analysis Accordingly, data analysis follows a qualitative approach. Specifically, it follows the methodology of the coding paradigm and analytic approach of Grounded Theory, according to Strauss and Corbin (1999) - implying the sequential steps of open, axial, and selective coding. This will allow for the detection of various phenomena and the correlation with their roots, conditions, and effects, which finally helps to answer the posed research questions.

There is emerging consent for the need of societal transformation, in order to face current and future global as well as local challenges. Beyond political initiatives, transformation processes particularly depend on social learning processes that enable people to contribute to a sustainable development (UNECE, 2013). In this regard, education, and teacher education in particular, play a key role and we will have to rely strongly on teachers’ competencies and their commitment to sustainability, if we aim at a successful integration of ESD into school practice and curricula (UNECE, 2013; UNESCO, 2014). Taking that into consideration, this research project investigates an innovative approach of transdisciplinary collaboration in teacher education, which is expected to support the integration of ESD both on micro- and a macro-level. Focusing on the collaboration in the described community of practice allows for an illustration of collaborative genesis of knowledge, processes of negotiation, as well as drivers and barriers for a successful implementation of ESD at school level. Qualitative results can uncover the impact that such collaboration in the described community of practice has on participating teachers and the schools involved in this special case. Insights into the effects of such collaboration can help to understand the general influence of similar projects on participating teachers and schools. Tracing identified phenomena, underlying processes, as well as drivers and barriers will further unravel collective learning processes with regards to ESD in general, which potentially promotes future research and school practice. In the end, this study aims at finding out influence factors for school improvement relating to ESD and thus societal transformation towards a sustainable development.

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