Sustainability Education in All-Day Schools

In an era, which is characterised by a climate crisis, rapid loss of biodiversity, depletion of natural resources and continuation of global inequalities, it is pertinent to empower especially young people not only to change their thinking but also to change their actions in a sustainable way. While there is relative global consent, that transformative learning is necessary for sustainable development, the path towards it is often less clear. In order to deal with all these challenges, we need schools and educators, that lead by example and try out new, innovative pedagogical approaches in their 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-Day schools show a great potential as they also offer more extracurricular activities than half day schools, which is important in education for sustainable development (ESD) / transformative education. Furthermore, as children spend more time in this type of school social learning plays a more important role as well. Thus All-Day schools seem well suited to holistically incorporate ESD and transformative learning into their educational programme and to adapt their everyday practices.

The aim of our project was to support All-day schools in developing a curriculum as well as day-to-day practices, which foster sustainability education and make an impact toward climate stability. Thus, a major priority is that pupils are learning about sustainability in order to become active citizens, who are conscious about the environment and our climate and act accordingly. In order to reach this goal, key competences have to be acquired by teachers and pupils alike. Additionally value education, civic engagement and participation lie at the core of sustainability and environmental education and thus were vital ingredients to this project. The project 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 were researched through case studies, the project aimed at fostering (all-day) schools' transformation towards sustainability education and everyday practices by developing in-service training modules for schools wishing to adapt their programme towards ESD and transformative learning and to change their school policy in accordance with the whole-institution approach.

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 each case, 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.

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' feedback Course guidelines Policy brief based on the course guidelines 2 further scientific papers disseminating the theoretical background and the project results