Introduction

Purpose

Are you working with education for sustainable development or wish to do so? Do you have doubts or troubles with how to (better) teach and create transformative education for sustainability? This paper gathers reflections and advice from six Nordic educational organisations with experience in the field.

Background

From 2022 to 2024, six different Nordic institutions have shared and explored pedagogical approaches, dilemmas, barriers and potentials as well as the organisational prerequisites for creating true transformative education for sustainability.

In the first part of the project, 11 recommendations for practitioners were formulated. The second part resulted in five videos with the participants’ advice for school leaders, a policy brief for the Nordic Council of Ministers and this one-pager for practitioners. We highly recommend using this paper as a supplementary part of the total body of products.

The suggestions in this paper follow the recommendations formulated in the policy brief, aiming to promote a paradigm shift towards emphasising diversity, pedagogical freedom and Bildung within adult education in the Nordic countries. But how do we do this as practitioners? How do we develop a personal take on sustainability, both personally and professionally? How do we meet the pedagogical challenges that the sustainability agenda evokes? And how do we find or create a supportive tribe that helps us conduct transformative sustainability education?

Point of departure

One way to get started is to initiate a learning process which takes your current teaching and competences as the point of departure:

Look at your strengths and weaknesses in terms of sustainability education and then integrate new inspirations step by step
Prioritise time to exchange experiences with colleagues, attend inspiring seminars, in-service training courses, and learning networks