Action Education for Social Change & Sustainability

Want to contribute to a more just and sustainable world? Would you like to build a better education for the future? Then this Minor is for you!

This Minor is a 10-week program in which you learn to work with a step-by-step framework to make education transformative and sustainable. You’ll go on a journey from your brain, to yourself, to your group, to your community, and finally, the world, looking at how education can trigger transformation at every one of these levels. You’ll apply what you learned to build your own educational experiment in a team project – student projects in this Minor have included serious games, teacher training programs, new forms of examinations, student workshops and other exciting interventions.

This Minor is for students from any disciplinary background with a heart for transformative education. You don’t need teaching experience: it is suitable for beginners and students with coaching or teaching experience alike.

The Minor is built around 3 tracks: education, projects and reflection.

In the Education Track, you’ll experience a range of teaching methods like PBL, jigsawing, implosion, and our climate game COLLAPSE. Through lectures & workshops, you’ll learn what makes teaching methods
successful, and how to design your own teaching materials by aligning goals, teaching activities and assessments. You’ll encounter interdisciplinary learning philosophies, like cognitive psychology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical pedagogy and post-humanism that will broaden your views on education.

The Project Track forms the backbone of the Minor. You will define and analyse a real-world education problem in a primary, secondary or higher education context. You choose your research methods, then use the tools from the education track to create an education experiment that can lead to implementation in your chosen educational setting.

The Reflection Track accompanies the other tracks in a build-up including intake interviews, 3 reflection diaries, 3 workshops on cognitive & individual reflection and group & societal reflection, and a final reflection paper to bring it all together.

This Minor was rated best Minor at EUR in 2023. The Minor coordinator and teacher, Dr. Ginie Servant-Miklos, is a world-renowned expert on transformative education, and the author of the best-selling book Pedagogies of Collapse: a Hopeful Education for the End of the World as we Know it.

Knowledge goals:

• Students will demonstrate understanding of key thinkers upon whose work the biggest educational innovations of the 20th & 21st century were based.  
  

• Students will analyse classroom experiments from around the world as inspiration for their own project design.   
  

• Students will identify the rationale behind and practice learning with problem-based learning, embodied learning, jigsawing, case-based learning, closed reading, object-based learning and serious gaming.   
  

Practical skills:

• Students will make personal learning goals and evaluate progress on those goals throughout their learning journey.
• Students will reflect on their own learning and practice through the reflection track.
• Students will apply their knowledge to an educational case study.
• Students will practice working in a problem-oriented project work environment, including group collaboration skills.
• Students will design an educational innovation in response to social or sustainability problems in primary, secondary or higher education that intervenes appropriately at the cognitive, individual, group, society and global levels.

Hybrid mode: The Minor can be run in hybrid mode to accommodate UNIC students who are making use of the virtual mobility option. Students from the LDE universities (Leiden, Erasmus, Delft) are expected to be on campus for the duration of the program, though some exceptions for online learning can be made in case of sickness or some other exceptional situation (by prior arrangement with the teachers). We’ve had good experiences with the hybrid mode as this has allowed sick students to continue to follow the learning activities, and to learn from their peers in other European universities. Minor duration: this Minor is a 10-week, 15 ECTS programme. This is NOT a 30-ECTS education Minor. If you have any questions or hesitations, please e-mail the Minor coordinator Dr. Ginie Servant-Miklos servant@essb.eur.nl

Teaching methods

• Project Track: students will participate in a group project using the problem-oriented project work approach

• Education Track: students will experiment with problem-based learning, embodied learning, jigsawing, object-based learning, and serious gaming. They will also participate in interactive lectures, and workshops.

• Reflection Track: students will practice journaling, interviews, and participate in workshop

Teaching materials

• Book chapters

• Journal articles

• Explanatory videos

• Fieldwork visits

Method of examination

• Case studies (20%): Students present a contemporary best-practice example of education innovation.
• Project Report (40%): Students write a 4000–5000-word report on their education innovation design in their groups. There is one mark for the whole group.
• Project presentation (10%): Students prepare a 15–20-minute presentation as a group, followed by 15 minutes of individual questions & answers. They get an individual mark for this.
• ALR (30%): Adapted from Ash and Clayton (2014), students write a meta-reflection on their learning journey throughout the Minor, using their learning diaries as “key moments” to draw a learning arc across all levels of reflection.

Composition final grade

• Case studies (20%) - individual
• Project report (40%) - group
• Project presentation (10%) - individual
• ALR (30%) - individual