Sustainability Education in All-Day Sch...

In an era, which is characterized by a climate crisis, the shortening of resources and global inequalities, it is pertinent to empower people not only to change their thinking but also to drastically change their actions. While there is relative global consent, that transformative learning is necessary for sustainable development, the path towards it is often less clear.

Schools need to react to changing conditions and educational developments in the light of these global issues. While a change of pedagogy in the direction of transformative education - an education which facilitates a necessary socio-ecological societal transformation is important, there is also a link between the design of outdoor facilities and the availability of natural spaces in general with sustainability education. Accordingly it is important not only to work on pedagogy, but to simultaneously pay attention to the design and layout of schools.

In order to deal with all these challenges, we need schools and educators, which lead by example and try out new, innovative pedagogical approaches in their schools. In this respect, especially all-day schools show a great potential. The extended time pupils spend at school means more equality between children from high and low income families. Secondly, they offer more extracurricular activities than half day schools, which is important in ESD. Furthermore, as children spend more time in this type of school social learning plays a more important role as well. The curricula of many all-day schools contain numerous topics and educational principles, which are analogous to goals and principles of education for sustainable development (ESD) or just need little adaptation in order to meet these goals. Thus All-Day schools seem well suited to holistically incorporate ESD and transformative learning into their educational programme and to adapt their practice both in the mornings and in the afternoons.

The project team of SustainALL consists of two Austrian educational institutions, KPH Graz and the University of Klagenfurt, the Inland Norway University, University of Porto and PH Ludwigsburg. All partner institutions have a strong background in sustainability education and long experience in teacher training. The project aims at developing in-service training modules for All-Day schools wishing to adapt their programme towards ESD and transformative learning. In order to do so, this project aims at learning from existing good-practice examples. Accordingly two case studies in all-day schools are going to be conducted in each project country. The different project countries (Norway, Portugal, Germany and Austria) differ in their educational concepts, curricula and practices. Thus a greater learning effect can be expected than from a national project. Following the analysis of the single cases, the next step is a cross case analysis of all cases, focusing on similarities and differences between the project countries and school types.