Educational Design and Teaching for Sustainability

This course enables students to understand, design, facilitate and experience sustainability-oriented teaching, learning and capacity-building processes. It is targeted towards students who seek to build their capacities as future sustainability-oriented educators, to design an educational initiative from the inside-out (i.e. based on their matters of concern and what they care about), and to engage with deep learning processes fostering responsibility and transformation in educational contexts (e.g. a school), in communities (e.g. a group of citizens), and in organizations (e.g. a local government).

The course is envisioned as a ‘laboratory’. It is intended to facilitate students' abilities to integrate the theory and the practice of education, teaching and learning aiming at fostering responsible engagement into sustainability challenges, at the crossroad between science and society. Based on their own aspirations, students design an educational initiative of their own choosing to address a sustainability aspect they care about, and put into action their didactical abilities while considering the socio-cultural characteristics of the context of their initiative. Through this initiative, students gain the tools to design an educational module or trajectory, and to facilitate the cultivation of multiple ways of knowing, being and doing that help responding to sustainability challenges. Depending on the nature of the initiative, students can experiment with a variety of creative methods of teaching, facilitation, and capacity-building in order to encourage mental, emotional, somatic, moral and aesthetic forms of learning. Students, from a variety of disciplines, closely interact throughout the course by working in peer groups supporting each other and exchanging feedback.

Given the interactive character of the course, participation to all classes/course activities is compulsory.

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:

• Understand education and learning theories and how they can be applied for cultivating people's sustainability-oriented understanding, engagement, and transformation
• Understand the key challenges of education, teaching and learning in relation to a wicked problem such as sustainability in formal education settings (e.g. in higher education) and non-formal or informal settings (e.g. in multi-stakeholder comm
• Identify a sustainability challenge they care about and articulate its characteristics
• Design an educational initiative of own choice (e.g. a module, course, training, blog, etc.) to respond to that identified sustainability challenge
• Apply a variety of teaching and learning activities and articulate and justify corresponding theoretical underpinnings from the education and learning sciences
• Reflect on their (future) role and purpose as an educational professional and the competences needed to perform this role within the context of sustainability challenges

Assumed Knowledge:
ELS31806 or comparable experience in teaching and/or training.