Regional sustainability networks in the Netherlands are rooted in regionalculture and have an emphasis on social learning and effective collaboration between multiple actors. The national ‘Duurzaam Door’ (Moving Forward Sustainably) Policy Programme regards these networks as generative governance arrangements where new knowledge, actions and relations can co-evolve together with new insights in governance and learning within sustainability transitions. In order to understand the dynamics of the learning in these networks we have monitored emergent properties of social learning between 2014 and 2016. Our focus is particularly on the interrelated role of trust, commitment, reframing and reflexivity. Our aim is to better understand the role and the dynamics of these emergent properties and to see which actors and roles can foster the effectiveness of social learning in regional transitions towards more sustainable ways of living. We used a retrospective analysis with Reflexive Monitoring in Action (RMA), which we combined with the Most Significant Change approach. We found that reflexivity in particularis a critical property at moments that can make or break the process.
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Higher education has the potential to act as ecosystem catalysts, connecting with the places our institutions which they are a part of, for learning-based changes with wicked (sustainability) challenges. This, however, calls for reorienting and rethinking of the higher educational narratives and subsequent practices towards more ecological and relational ones. In this study, a pilot aimed to connect a course at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands) to an industrial park next to the university which is undergoing transition towards a sustainable living space. The pilot, which ran from September 2020 to February 2021, included 17 students from 9 nationalities and 12 different bachelor programmes, and was designed according to the concepts of an ‘ecology of learning’. In this semester long course, called Mission Impact, students reflected every five-weeks, to capture their learning experiences using a combination of arts-based and narrative reflection methods. Two questions guided the analysis: (1) what are the key design characteristics of an ecological approach to higher education that connects to sustainability transformations (in times of COVID-19) and (2) what does this type of education asks from to learners. The reflective artefacts were analysed using Narratives of T-Mapping and juxtaposed with autoethnographic insights maintained by the first author for triangulation. Preliminary results of this pilot include the structure in chaos, space for transformation, openness for emerging futures & action confidence as components of such an ecological education that connects to and co-creates sustainability transformations.
This workshop addresses the development of teacher competencies for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and builds upon the learning experiences in the first of two periods of the Erasmus+ Teacher Academy EduSTA. By embracing different countries, educational cultures, contexts and needs, EduSTA aimed to cocreate a generic competence-based teacher role description, based on the current teacher competencies frameworks for ESD (Ametller, 2024), underpinning a prototype for micro-credentials, digital open badge-driven learning pathways and accompanying learning modules for teachers. The aim of the workshop is two-fold:1. Participants are actively involved in furthering the discussion on bringing sustainability education to life by negotiating the tensions and dilemmas in translating sustainability education concepts to teacher development practise. 2. Workshop hosts triangulate the tensions and dilemmas identified in the EduSTA badge-design process with the perspectives of educational stakeholders beyond the consortium. In a learning by doing process, participants in this workshop are presented with a set of educational design principles that foster ESD. In mixed groups they are invited to negotiate possibilities to make room for transformative learning, assessment as learning and communal and authentic learning while building upon the developed EduSTA badge constellation prototype, its competence objectives and criteria.
