SuFu - Integrating sustainability thinking in teacher education

Understanding how to integrate sustainability thinking and teaching in teacher education programmes

Building on the rich disciplinary backgrounds of the members of SuFu (educational science, change management, and sustainability thinking), we aim to address three core research themes, as identified by current state of the art as well as the experience and expertise of the programme members:

1. Institutional Frameworks and Policy Alignment: SuFu will explore the establishment of institutional frameworks for sustainability in teacher education and the alignment of these frameworks with national policies and priorities.  
2. Teacher Competences and Development Pathways: SuFu will focus on the competences, skills, and professional development pathways necessary for teachers to effectively integrate sustainability into their teaching practices, and how initiatives such as the BDV can foster such. 
3. Educational Innovation, Future-Oriented Approaches, and Student Engagement: SuFu will investigate how sustainability education can be framed as an educational innovation, connected to future-oriented pedagogies, and tailored to engage students effectively. 

The pursuit of these three core research themes will be operationalized by SuFu through the exploration of already initiated sustainability initiatives at UiS. Note that all initiatives mentioned below are independent of SuFu, but have clear ties to SuFu and its members in their purpose of promoting sustainability thinking and action amongst lecturers and students:

The Sustainability Hub (BDV) is a new initiative at the UH faculty, with the aim of establishing an interdisciplinary, low-threshold learning space for teacher education students, lecturers, researchers, and partners in practice settings. BDV provides an arena for its users to meet, discuss and practice LfS, and develop research and development projects. The BDV initiative is currently in its pilot phase and the development processes and outcomes present interesting cases for SuFu to research. It offers opportunities for exploring all three core research themes above. Inspired by educational design research, SuFu aims to use the BDV as a case to investigate and develop design principles for integrating sustainability thinking into teacher education through a learning lab.

The "Sustainability and green transition (SV100)"-course is a new UiS-wide initiative at the SV faculty, born out of the UiS green transitions initiative. This course is an offer to all UiS bachelor students with the goal to develop critical and creative thinking and acquire tools to contribute to sustainable development and link theoretical knowledge to real social challenges. This is an interesting case for SuFu to research in terms of how sustainability is aimed to be integrated through renewal of the UiS course portfolio and offers opportunities to explore top-down collaborative efforts at LfS (theme 1) and how such efforts can exemplify broader educational values of sustainability thinking for students (theme 3). 

Comparative studies of learning labs for learning for sustainability in higher education: SuFu brings together representatives of four different learning labs with sustainability-perspectives: BDV at UiS, Sustainability Hub at NMBU, Senter for samarbeidslæring for bærekraftig utvikling (CCL) at HINN and Vrijplaats at the Artevelde University of Applied Science, Belgium. SuFu will seek to critically and comparatively research and uncover the approaches, methodologies and achievements of these hubs, particularly to understand how institutional frameworks can give momentum to such initiatives (theme 1), and how lecturer and student engagement can be supported (theme 2 & 3), in order to develop best practice recommendations.

External partners