Climate change is one of the most critical challenges of our time, requiring significant responses from all aspects of society, including education. The prevailing responses to climate change tend towards treating the crisis as a predominantly scientific and managerial issue that requires technological solutions or behaviour changes.…

This study was about a university course, "Mindfulness & Sustainability" (GC495), that I designed, instructed, and assessed. Twenty-one students and I went on a mindful learning journey; together we cultivated a community of Transformative Sustainability Learning (TSL). I used The Work that Reconnects (WTR) to teach mindfulness in…

This paper approaches climate change as a superordinate concern that should guide a holistic transformation of formal schooling towards integration and sustainability. The call for climate change education (CCE) has been amplified by international organizations and youth protestors alike, united by a shared concern for our planet. By combining CCE…

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 4.7 promotes education for sustainable development (ESD), urging higher education institutions (HEIs) to prepare students to address global sustainability challenges. Currently, the target indicators do not assess how ESD is enacted in HEIs, making ESD provision a black box in achieving SDG 4.7. This…

The escalating planetary crises of human-induced climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and declining biodiversity call for urgent actions to be taken at all levels of society and by the global community. The current political strategy for a sustainable future that emphasizes economic and technological progress is insufficient to…

Place-based knowledge, a legacy from our ancestors, is inherently sustainable. However, modern lifestyles have eclipsed this wisdom, leading to environmental issues such as land and water pollution. Similarly, the current pedagogical practices often fail to connect place-based knowledge. It resulted in a deviation of students' contextual learning.…

This study explores the integration of key Transformative Learning Theory (TLT) principles into design education to foster Visual Literacy (VL) and promote awareness of environmental issues among undergraduate students. Through thematic analysis of 22 illustrated infographics, ideation sketches and supporting textual data created by art and design…

The planetary crisis facing humanity makes essential the incorporation of learning about climate change and sustainability in the university curriculum. Yet the ooting of climate change in values, knowledge systems and societal structures means that this incorporation must be more than just addition of knowledge content into a pre-existing…

Purpose: This study aims to bring together the available scattered knowledge about teaching and learning in Living Labs within higher education, and to explore their potential for supporting students' sustainability-oriented transformative learning. Design/methodology/approach: A literature review was conducted, applying a realist approach. A…

This article explores how global citizenship can be seen in the practices of science education in the context of international education policy and Finnish school and teacher education, with a focus on scientific literacy and sustainability education for promoting a sustainable future. Possibilities of science education to promote sustainability…

Human rights education (HRE) is an emerging practice across formal and informal educational sectors worldwide. However, most literature and theory on HRE emphasize the importance of imparting knowledge about human rights. In this paper, we argue that increasing tolerance among students is a vital but understudied aspect of HRE. This paper is based…

The question what the focus of climate change education should be has been debated by academics and policy makers. However, this debate is informed to only a limited extent by empirical research on the position of teachers. Based on interviews with nineteen experienced secondary geography teachers in the Netherlands, nine orientations were…

Purpose: This study aims at understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute to sustainable development, by designing their programmes for bringing about a transformative impact on communities and students, and also to examine what alternative pedagogical approaches could be used for that. In the past decades, HEIs have…

A reconceptualization of education for sustainability and global citizenship education (GCE) is proposed, considering evidence from the United Nations decade of education for sustainable development (ESD) and from research with policymakers and adult educators in Wales. In this reframing, global citizenship education is foregrounded, and the model…

Popular instructional approaches in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS) are co-construction learning, transformative learning and ecological learning. These rely on constructivism that could challenge human-nature relationships of ECEfS. In this study, we aim to discover and reshape human-nature relationships embedded in the…