‘Sustainable education’ is a phrase widely used, but sometimes lacking definition. The European Universities Alliance, Circle U, funded a project to explore how ‘sustainable education’ has been conceptualised in the literature and by key organisations like UNESCO, and to find good examples where students and academics had turned ideas about ‘sustainable education’ into practice. Research for the project, ‘Conceptualising and Operationalising Sustainable Education’ (COSE) was conducted by students, supported and facilitated by Circle U’s education chairs. The COSE report is available below.
Some of the students won a further grant from Circle U to turn a selection of the videoed interviews into a teaching resource by editing them and providing a written summary with searchable keywords. This project was called Sustainable Education Video Library (SEVIL) and the report and videos are below.
Aarhus University’s pro-dean for education, Niels Lehmann, then invited Sue Wright to work on how these ideas about sustainable education could work in a Danish context and be operationalised across the ARTS faculty. As a first step, a conference co-hosted by the Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF) and the Centre for Environmental Humanities (CEH) was held on 3 May 2024. This resulted in a report of the conference, which is available below and includes ideas about possible ways forward based on a ‘sustainability paradigm’ for educational development.
On 3 May 2024, this conference brings together students, academics and university leaders engaged in experimenting with how university education can contribute to making a more sustainable planet.
The event will ask:
• What might sustainable education mean in a Danish context?
How can education programmes more substantially integrate disciplinary knowledge with the skills and capabilities to use that knowledge to achieve change?
• How might we operationalise it at AU?
What institutional structures would enable universities to better sustain and spread the innovative educational projects that growing numbers of students and academics are undertaking?
The event builds on a Circle U report and includes presentations of sustainable education initiatives by students and academics in Denmark and abroad.
