In 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals, as the core of the Agenda 2030, were signed by all member states of the United Nations. The global goals include the aim to reduce poverty and inequalities, improve global education and health, and at the same time protect our global resources and ecosystem to fight climate change. In this article, we show what contribution schools in Graz are already making to achieve the global goals. For this study, three important dimensions of the SDGs such as inclusion, diversity and contents of environment, health & peace were analyzed in the urban school context. On the basis of a qualitative content analysis, school’s online representations were investigated to what extent schools in Graz give public account on activities and provisions related to three chosen dimensions of the SDGs. We do find small urban disparities with regard to the facilitation of inclusion when analyzing different social areas in the city. We also found out that all-day schools present more of all SDGs related activities on their websites than half-day schools, with secondary-schools being more active with regard to environment, health and peace. The study also reveals a trend towards virtually presented teaching and learning activities on the topic of sustainability. This article will help to further understand the educational landscape in an Austrian urban environment and gives an insight into current actions, which leads to identifying what school still have to accomplish in order to create more sustainable and equitable generations that embrace global values.

At first content analysis approach, as suggested by Herring (2010), was applied to the analysis of the websites of all schools in Graz. Content analysis enables the gaining of insight into the intentions and preferences of a text. In this case it is the websites author(s) intentions and preferences, about which we do not have further information. However, we assume that this is unlikely that content is not reviewed in accordance to the school program and activities by the principal, who is formally responsible for ensuring that information provided is in accordance with the law (Strohmeyer, 2018). We followed the step model of deductive category application of content analysis suggested by Mayring (2003) using MaxQDA (Kuckartz, 2014). For this purpose, all text on websites were converted into documents and further structured into coding units. To ensure comparability we only included content not older that for the school year 2018/2019. A code was given per unit when the information presented in the passage gave clear indication for the presence of a certain feature or characteristic or the usage or application of a certain pedagogical approach. Following an iterative approach all codes were reviewed several times across and within schools to ensure consistency. If contradictions became apparent and could not be solved codes were not considered for further analysis. To ensure quality of the coding system the website for one school with 25 pages was coded by two independent persons with an acceptable intercoder reliability of 85 percent (Mayring (2008) cited in Gläser-Zikuda, 2013). For the present analysis codes were dichotomized per subcategory, indicating an explicit mentioning. The frequency of occurrences is not further considered. Our deductive category application followed the principle of working with prior formulated and theoretically derived aspects of analysis and connecting them with the content being studied. We decided to differentiate structures, features and activities related to SDGs into three main content dimensions: inclusion, diversity and environment, health & peace. Inclusion here refers to provision and activities catering for students with disabilities or special needs. Diversity to all activities and provisions catering for diversity in terms of language, culture and socio-economic background. We further distinguished between “organization, personnel & (infra-) structure”, “teaching and learning” and “school culture” in each dimension.For further analysis the code matrix was imported to SPSS (Bühl, 2012). Factor and reliability analysis informed the ordering of categories and scale creation.

In general, there can be said that SDGs-related learning activities at schools in Graz are rather limited, even though almost all schools present at least on activities or structural/organizational provisions, considering the variety of options an average of two activities per school is still very little. In the field of sustainability, the most comprehensive concepts in this dimension can be found in academic secondary schools. In contrast to that it became apparent that most schools, with less than one activity per school seem less ready for inclusion and diversity. Nearly half of all schools in Graz didn’t even report on inclusive provisions or activities and also one quarter of all schools didn’t provide information in relation to diversity. Previous research has also shown a lack of quality in inclusive education (Buchner& Gebhardt, 2011) and that the teachers need more provision in time for team teaching and resources (Gasteiger-Klicpera & Besic, 2016). As expected we found differences between half-day and all-day schools and also secondary schools, especially with regard to the environmental, health & peace dimension. We interpret this as an indication that school autonomy and additional learning time maybe support the implementation of SDGs related activities. We also found small differences between different urban parts of the city, with schools being located in parts of the city having a more challenging student intake showing less and less often comprehensive concepts. Two explanations are possible: These schools do not find the time to make all their work visible publicly, or these schools do in fact have less activities and provisions to offer. The latter could be judged as structural inequality and therefore especially problematic.

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