Transforming Education - towards a sustainable future

The research community engages with sustainability education research in a multidisciplinary and across-level approach, with an emphasis on producing knowledge on how learning environments, teaching approaches, and attitudes and ideologies of teachers and students shape and are shaped by sustainability education and its outcomes.

At present, the world as we know it is undergoing rapid, global changes, including serious environmental problems. These changes will make the life of today’s children, and the generations to come, very different from ours, but it is difficult to predict what the future will look like. To meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world and an unpredictable future, educational researchers increasingly acknowledge the need for changes in education systems and the views on what should be emphasized and how.

Sustainable development is a rich framework that acknowledges that the social, political, economic and environmental conditions for human life are tightly entangled, and that solutions to challenges within each of these dimensions are not isolated within that dimension but must be pursued from a multidiscipline perspective. From an educational point of view, this means that even if the individual disciplines approach sustainability thinking from a discipline-specific perspective, children and adolescents need to attain comprehensive and holistic understandings of the paths to more sustainable societies.

Transforming Education research community combines research efforts on practical teaching approaches, varied educational environments, and the views and attitudes of children/pupils as well as pre- and in-service teachers to provide wide perspectives on sustainability education. The research community aims to explore, identify and realize potential opportunities to develop sustainability education in kindergartens, schools and universities towards a more holistic, transdisciplinary and transformative education that evokes a deep understanding of the sustainability issues and their solutions.

With its multidisciplinary approach to sustainability education, including the entire education system from early childhood education to higher education, Transforming Education aims to be an agent of change in both contributing to sustainability education research, and to the development of sustainability education in kindergartens, schools, teacher education and the informal educational sector.

The management team of the research group:

• Tuula Skarstein /Associate professor, IBU (leder)
• Frode Skarstein / Associate professor, IGIS
• Ulrich Dettweiler / Professor, IKS

Monthly seminar: "Bærekraftsseminaret"

With this new seminar series, we want to create a multidisciplinary meeting place for everyone who is interested in sustainability education. The goal is to gain insight into current research, as well as to create room for increased collaboration in both teaching and research on the topic.

See our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/berekraftseminaret