Sustainability Education in All-Day Schools

<< Background >>In an era, which is characterised by a climate crisis, rapid loss of biodiversity, depletion of natural resources andcontinuation of global inequalities, it is pertinent to empower especially young people not only to change their thinking butalso to change their actions in a sustainable way. While there is relative global consent, thattransformative learning is necessary for sustainable development, the path towards it is often less clear. In order to deal with all thesechallenges, we need schools and educators, that lead by example and try out new, innovative pedagogical approaches intheir schools and are willing to make changes to school policy beyond its pedagogy, in alignment with a whole-school approach. In this respect, especially All-Dayschools show a great potential as they also offer more extracurricular activities than half day schools, which is importantin education for sustainable development (ESD) / transformative education. Furthermore, as children spend more time inthis type of school social learning plays a more important role as well. Thus All-Day schools seem well suited to holisticallyincorporate ESD and transformative learning into their educational programme and to adapt their everyday practices.<< Objectives >>The aim of our project was to support All-day schools in developing a curriculum as well as day-to-day practices, whichfoster sustainability education and make an impact toward climate stability. Thus, a major priority is that pupils are learning about sustainability in order to become activecitizens, who are conscious about the environment and our climate and act accordingly. In order to reach this goal, keycompetences have to be acquired by teachers and pupils alike. Additionally value education, civic engagement andparticipation lie at the core of sustainability and environmental education and thus were vital ingredients to this project. Theproject endorsed the whole-school approach, integrating ESD / transformative education in a holistic manner.The project aimed at learning from existing good-practice examples. Based on these examples, which wereresearched through case studies, the project aimed at fostering (all-day) schools' transformation towards sustainability education and everydaypractices by developing in-service training modules for schools wishing to adapt their programme towards ESDand transformative learning and to change their school policy in accordance with the whole-institution approach.<< Implementation >>Two case studies in all-day schools were conducted in each project country - one in a primary and one in a secondary school. Following the individual analysis of eachcase, the next step was a comparative analysis of all cases, focusing on similarities and differences between the project countries and school types. The results were then used to create teacher-training modules and materials. The development of these followed an Educational-Design research approach based on researcher-practitioner-design hubs, which were held in all project countries. Based on the idea of involving creative people with different professional backgrounds - partly from the case study institutions and partly from the project partners institutions - as an intellectual core within a design process, this methodology was tailored specifically to the development of the teacher training course and materials. Its core, the teacher-practitioner (TP) design hub, was constituted by representatives of the project partners and case study schools. Following the development of the course, based on the results of both the case study research and the TP design hubs, we piloted the course, which is hosted on the iMooX platform. Throughout this 11 week course, we were regularly meeting and supporting the participants in order to help them in implementing sustainability measures in their institutions using a whole-school approach. At the end, the course was evaluated by the participating teachers and revised accordingly. The revised course is available free of charge on iMoox: https://imoox.at/course/SustainALL. Furthermore, the project team developed guidelines for schools to use in their transformation towards sustainability, which are essentially a condensed version of the course. These guidelines are available in a longer version for download from the project homepage (www.sustainall.eu), and as an interactive presentation on the homepage. The project results were presented at the final conference in Klagenfurt, where attendants were also provided with a printed version of the guidelines. In addition, project partners have printed their language versions for the teachers involved in the project.<< Results >>Case studies: 8 individual case study reports, 1 cross case analysis, one scientific paper.Course development: iMoox Course based on videos produced by the partners, piloted and adapted according to participants' feedbackCourse guidelinesPolicy brief based on the course guidelines 2 further scientific papers disseminating the theoretical background and the project results