To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), comprehensive and transformational learning is necessary at every level (e.g., Sterling, 2016). For education systems, the existential urgency of current unsustainability implies a necessity to reconsider education policies, curricula, didactics as well as the places and settings, in which learning takes place. Regarding the learning environment, the concept of Whole Institution Approaches (WIAs) puts emphasis on the notion that sustainability learning is not only a matter of adding new contents and didactics to the established teaching in class, but that a considerable proportion of learning is informal (e.g., Schugurensky, 2000), and shaped by the daily experiences learners make in interaction with their social and physical surroundings (e.g., Buckler & Creech, 2014; Henderson & Tilbury, 2004; Sterling, 2004). Therefore, WIAs call for an alignment of the hidden curriculum (e.g., social habits and rules, built and natural environment, for example Winter & Cotton, 2012) with an ambitious orientation of the formal curriculum-based learning towards sustainability.
Within the political and academic debate on sustainability in education, the concept of WIAs has emerged over the past years as an important cornerstone of countries´ and international organizations´ efforts to foster effective sustainability learning (e.g., Rieckmann, 2018; UNESCO, 2020; Wals & Benavot, 2017). The key message – to walk the talk on sustainability – is widely accepted as a core objective of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD, e.g., UNESCO, 2021) and descriptions of approaches exist particularly for school education (e.g., Henderson & Tilbury, 2004) and higher education (e.g. McMillin & Dyball, 2009). Yet, while various conceptual articles, guidebooks, and reports exist, few attempts have been made to (a) develop a literature-based conceptual synthesis of the core characteristics of WIAs across the different areas of education, and (b) systematically and quantitatively assess the status of practical implementation within entire education systems. Regarding the latter, it is particularly striking that, while participation and learner-orientation are overarchingly considered as critical parts of WIAs, little data is available on the perspective of learners and educators on the practical integration of sustainability within their everyday learning environments. Instead, most available data relies on the naturally biased self-reporting of individuals within the formal leadership of educational organizations, e.g. principals, directors, or sustainability officers (for one of the fewer examples of assessments with educators, see Mogren et al., 2019).
Thus, aiming to contribute to a more systematic understanding of coherent sustainability learning and, to support effective sustainability governance in education, the presented research attempts to
(i) conceptually synthesize the international literature on WIAs across areas of education,
(ii) develop, refine and pretest a questionnaire, and
(iii) use this operationalization to assess the status of WIA implementation in Germany.
For this, a systematic qualitative literature analysis is combined with an expert review to develop a joint framework for WIAs (Holst, under review). The framework is operationalized into quantitatively assessable items, which are tested and refined through extensive qualitative and quantitative pretests. Finally, the instrument is used to quantitatively assess the practical implementation of WIAs within formal organizations of the German education system (n > 2.500 learners and educators).
