Teaching & Education
In recent years many lecturers as well as students have experimented with integrating sustainability-related content into their teaching at universities. In addition didactic-pedagogical research was conducted to complement these experience-led activities. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) provides the opportunity to transform the academic process of mediation from the frontal teaching into more modern learning-teaching arrangements. ESD is not primarily an additional learning content, but a changed method of knowledge and competence transfer.
In the HOCHN network, research is being conducted on how the existing knowledge about and experiences with ESD within the universities can be better diffused and used in teaching. In doing so different levels must be differentiated:
1. explicit sustainability degree courses
2. subject curricula
3. interdisciplinary area
The resulting guide will link the developments in the modernization of academic teaching with the requirements of ESD, which are not necessarily parallel. Additionally the guide will describe, closely linked to the “governance” - field of action, how curricula can be modified in order to permanently offer sustainability courses. In addition crosslinking with the field of “research” is relevant in order to elaborate the dimension of research-based learning and to reach the aim of linking teaching and research to ESD.
The chair in the HOCHN network for the area of activity "teaching" is the University of Bremen (Prof. Dr. Georg Müller-Christ, chair of business administration, in particular sustainable management) and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Prof. Dr. Thomas Potthast, international center for ethics in sciences).
Contact:
Universität Bremen: Merle Tegeler, tegeler@uni-bremen.de
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen: Leonie Bellina, leonie.bellina@izew.uni.tuebingen.de