Sustainability education workshops in Ecuador

From the 7^th – 14^th of December 2017, SEDwise partners Leif Östman (Uppsala University) and Katrien Van Poeck (Ghent University) were invited by VVOB as guest teachers for courses and workshops on sustainability education in Quito, Ecuador. They gave workshops and lectures for universities offering teacher training to technical teachers as well as for the Ministries of Education and Environment.

The goals of the mission were

• to support the partner universities to embed sustainability education in their courses through workshop combining lectures (practical theory), practical examples, exercises, and discussion;
• to strengthen capacities for implementation of sustainability education at policy-level with the Ministry of Education;
• to establish a sustainable partnership of universities involved in the VVOB-programme in Ecuador with SEDwise partners.

The workshops and lectures covered a variety of topics:

• What is education for sustainable development? An introduction
• Locally relevant sustainable development teaching
• Teaching democratic competences for sustainable development
• Three traditions of sustainable development teaching
• Transactive sustainable development teaching
• Embedding sustainable development in teacher training
• Exercises, e.g. clarification of values, scenario exercise ‘The Mission’…
• Ethical and political challenges of sustainable development teaching
• Political moves: How teachers can deal with sustainability controversies
• The SEDwise network
• Embedding sustainability in the curriculum: examples (e.g. UGent course ‘Sustainability thinking’)
• Monitoring sustainability education policymaking

In the context of these courses and workshops, the book “From vision to lesson: Education for sustainable development in practice” (Östman et al.) has been translated into Spanish. The methods and models described in the book largely inspired the workshops and will now be tried out by the course participants and adapted to the Equatorian context.