With the “European Green Deal”, environmental degradation and climate change gain increased political and public attention in Europe (European Commission 2023). Many institutions and enterprises have implemented sustainability activities, although tending to oversimplify “sustainability” by reducing it to environmentalist terms and efficiency of resources. However, both small and large organizations also need to address economic and social requirements in order to be “sustainable” in the sense of long-term success and responsibility. On the one hand, demand for alternative resources and products is rising, leading to changes in business models and market approaches. On the other hand, social movements such as „Fridays for Future” emphasize the changing value systems of young people, indicating that true corporate responsibility (both ecological and social) will be of increased importance for attracting qualified and motivated apprentices across Europe and beyond.

In Germany, education is understood to enable competences and sustainable structures (cf. Deutscher Bundestag 2017). Especially “vocational education and training for sustainable development” (VET-ESD) is promoted as a key factor, since a qualified workforce drives innovation and transformation. One example: the German transition to renewable energy (“Energiewende”) is significantly executed by qualified vocational workers (vgl. Hemkes et al. 2013). Considering the scope of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals), every vocation can contribute to sustainability in specific ways. Every step of a value chain offers possibilities to promote – or impede – sustainable developments, from raw materials, production and logistics to services and waste/disposal tasks.

How can these complex and domain-specific capabilities be identified and operationalized for vocational education curricula? In German VET, a multi-stakeholder approach to deriving vocational curricula is applied. Whenever curricula for a certain vocational domain are developed or updated, a group of representatives of different stakeholders enters discussion, managed by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (“Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung”, BIBB). While arguing in the interest of their stakeholders, the representatives in such committees draw knowledge from work research, current expertises, and pilot projects. Due to this discursive mode, modernizing official vocational curricula can be a long and cumbersome political process. Vocational schools, on the other hand, have to address students’ and apprentices’ needs in a changing world as immediately as possible in order to fulfill their educational missions.

In order to address these challenges, a network of three vocational schools in Berlin partnered with Humboldt-University, the NGO EPIZ – “Center for Global Citizenship Education” and the Senate Department for Education, which is responsible for teacher training. As “Flagship Schools for Sustainability”, they aim to develop innovative school-specific curricula and learning settings for sustainability in their respective vocations, which are: social security clerks at Hermann-Scheer-School, gardeners at Peter-Lenné-School and mechanics at Georg-Schlesinger-School. The diversity of these vocations (administration, “green”, and industrial domains) represents that sustainability is indeed relevant in all vocations, but with very different aspects. It also offers the possibility to research similarities and differences in curriculum development, aiming at generalizable knowledge such as transferrable design principles, to be applied to other vocations and schools in the future. With this aim, the academic partners in the network structure these development processes as design-based research projects (cf. McKenny/Reeves 2018) with a continuous flow of information, knowledge and feedback. This paper will delineate the applied curriculum development strategy, which is based on successful prior projects in different domains such as trade and logistics (Casper et al. 2021) and food production (Kastrup et al. 2021). Results to be presented are analytical competence frameworks for sustainability in the selected vocations and exemplary learning settings designed by participating teachers, as well as “lessons learned” considering prerequisites and design-principles for similar endeavors.

This paper follows the pragmatic methodology of the design-based research approach (cf. McKenney/Reeves 2018). The project partners equally pursue theory formation, verification and application. With this understanding, the analysis of individual innovative cases would lead to overarching theoretical findings from and about practice. The three schools and their respective development projects are such individual cases from which area-specific theories (i.e. models of sustainability-related vocational competences), situation-specific solutions (i.e. learning tasks) and transferrable design principles were developed. The well-tested strategy applied here for identifying sustainability-related vocational competences emerged from prior German projects in other domains (Casper et al. 2021, Kastrup et al. 2021). It follows six steps: (1) Associatively COLLECT aspects of sustainability in the given vocation. (2) DEFINE domain-specific tasks and process profiles concerning sustainable development and use these to specify the competence framework blueprint. (3) STRUCTURE the collected aspects by assigning them to slots of the specified VET-ESD framework. (4) FORMULATE vocational competences as learning objectives for selected slots of the framework. (5) ASSIGN these competences to given (if necessary: new) curriculum positions and sections of the respective educational standards documents. (6) CHECK whether crucial aspects have been missed, with special regards to the Sustainable Development Goals and slots of the framework which have yet been left empty. After defining competences and learning objectives, learning settings and tasks can be developed, applying teachers‘ professional knowledge and sustainability-specific didactical principles such as those proposed by Schütt-Sayed et al. (2021).

The core results presented here are the three vocation-specific competence frameworks, which are defined by an X-axis with integrated competence dimensions, i.e. “Sustainability Competences for …”: a) … product- and process-related expertise; b) … social responsibility; and c) … empowerment and identification; and a Y-axis with hierarchical fields of action, i.e. i) … job-related work processes; ii) … entrepreneurial and organizational decisions; and iii) … social developments and political decisions. These categories result in a three-by-five matrix with 15 competence slots for each of the three selected vocations. For each vocation, exemplary learning tasks will be presented to show how teachers operationalize the identified competences and to illustrate prerequisites, challenges and principles of curriculum development, such as school project group facilitation, workshop setups, and design templates for learning tasks.

Casper, M; Schütt-Sayed, S.; Vollmer, T. (2021). Nachhaltigkeitsbezogene Gestaltungskompetenz in kaufmännischen Berufen des Handels. In: C. Melzig, W. Kuhlmeier und S. Kretschmer (Ed.): Berufsbildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung. Die Modellversuche 2015–2019 auf dem Weg vom Projekt zur Struktur. Bonn: Barbara Budrich, p. 179–199. Deutscher Bundestag (2017). Bericht der Bundesregierung zur Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung - 18. Legislaturperiode. Berlin: Heenemann. – URL: http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/18/136/1813665.pdf (30.01.2023) European Commission (2023). A European Green Deal. Striving to be the first climate-neutral continent. URL: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en (30.01.2023) Hemkes, B.; Kuhlmeier, W.; Vollmer, T. (2013). Der BIBB-Förderschwerpunkt „Berufliche Bildung für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung" - Baustein zur Förderung gesellschaftlicher Innovationsstrategien. In: BWP 6/2013, 28–31. – URL: https://www.bibb.de/veroeffentlichungen/de/bwp/show/7168 Kastrup, J.; Kuhlmeier, W.; Strotmann, C. (2021). Entwicklung nachhaltigkeitsbezogener Kompetenzen in der Ausbildung. Ein Strukturmodell für Lebensmittelhandwerk und -industrie. In: BWP - Berufsbildung in Wissenschaft und Praxis (3), p. 24–27. McKenney, S.; Reeves, T. C. (2018). Conducting educational design research. London: Routledge. Schütt-Sayed, S.; Casper, M.; Vollmer, T. (2021). Mitgestaltung lernbar machen – Didaktik der Berufsbildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung. In: C. Melzig, W. Kuhlmeier und S. Kretschmer (Ed.): Berufsbildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung. Die Modellversuche 2015–2019 auf dem Weg vom Projekt zur Struktur. Bonn: Barbara Budrich, p. 200–227.