Session Information
06 SES 14 A JS, Navigating Uncertainty in a (Post)Digital World: Open Learning Cultures and Resources for Teaching Sustainability in European Teacher Education
Joint Symposium NW 06 and NW 30. Full details in NW 06, 06 SES 14 AJS
Contribution
Sustainability education is vital for the urgent transition to more just and sustainable futures, but also an inherently complex, uncertain and challenging pedagogical proposition. This complexity is apparent in the 17 “integrated and inseparable” Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015); and in distinct and diverse narratives around sustainability and sustainability education in political, academic and popular discourses (Tikly, 2023). ‘Universal’ definitions and frameworks must be negotiated in relation to particular socio-ecological contexts (Brockwell et al, 2022). Moreover, as formal education is deeply implicated in socio-ecological crises (Orr, 2004), realising the potential of education for sustainability involves moving beyond ‘improvement’ to transformation of education (UNESCO, 2021). Transdisciplinarity, which refers to approaches and processes which occur between, across and beyond traditional academic and social boundaries, including academic disciplines, but also professions, cultures, groups, fields of action, social worlds, nations, and media (Kondratjuk, 2023), is necessary for transformation in education (Mittelstraß, 2002). In this paper, we focus on transdisciplinarity in the context of the Erasmus + Teacher Academy Project –Teaching Sustainability (TAP-TS). The TAP-TS Consortium of 11 teacher education organisations, across 7 European countries, includes schools, universities, a government agency, an educational enterprise, and a civil society organisation. The project aims to foster social learning, including transformation, through transdisciplinary engagement across disciplinary, institutional and national boundaries. Digital technologies are both a thematic focus of TAP-TS, through the module ‘Sustainability and Digitality’ and a medium for transdisciplinary learning environments and interactions, for instance in the ‘Climate Crisis Resilience module. TAP-TS aims to foster European educators’ competences for sustainability education through engagement with educational materials and in online, hybrid and face to face learning events as part of an international community of practice. Community of practice is a model of social learning which recognises the complexity and particularities of distinct pedagogical contexts (Wenger-Trayner et. al., 2020). As such TAP-TS brings educators with a shared commitment to sustainability education together, recognising that educators engage with and apply learning in relation to their contexts of practice (ibid.). In this presentation, we describe various applications of digital technologies as part of TAP-TS; the extent to which these have enabled and limited social learning as part of our community of practice; and the ‘level of value’ achieved (ibid.). We draw on data from the project’s formative evaluation (KRE, 2023) that includes participant observation, document analysis, focus groups, and surveys.
References
Brockwell, A.J.,et al. (2022) Designing indicators and assessment tools for SDG Target 4.7: a critique of the current approach and a proposal for an ’Inside-Out’ strategy, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. Kondratjuk, M., et., al. (2023) (Eds.). Transdisziplinarität in der Bildungsforschung. Perspektiven und Herausforderungen theoretischer, method(olog)ischer und empirischer Grenzgänge. Reihe Studien zur Schul- und Bildungsforschung (ZSB). Springer VS. K and R Education (2023) Teacher Academy project Teaching Sustainability: Evaluation of year 1 activities. Mittelstraß, J. (2002). Transdisciplinarity - New Structures in Science. In Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (ed.), Innovate Structure in Basic Research. (pp. 43-54). Orr, D.W. (2004) Earth in Mind: On education, environment and the human prospect. Island Press. Tikly, L. (2023) Decolonizing Education for Sustainable Futures: Some Conceptual Starting Points, in: Hutchinson, Y. et al. (eds) (2023) Decolonizing Education for Sustainable Futures. Bristol Studies in Comparative and International Education. Pp. 19-48. UNESCO (2021) Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education. International Commission on the Futures of Education Wenger-Trayner, E. & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2020). Learning to make a difference. Value creation in social learning spaces. Cambridge University Press
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.