In April and May 2023, the fellow group on Transdisciplinarity for Holistic Sustainability Education: New Learning Approaches spent two months at Leuphana. The goal of the fellows, Dr. Alicia Jiménez, Programme Director of Earth Charter International, Costa Rica, and Prof. Charles Hopkins, UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability at York University, Canada, was to contribute to deepening the discussion around the changes needed to create education processes that serve the common good, to contribute solving real world complex problems, and to explore ESD in a local context.
The overall motivation behind the fellows coming to Leuphana was their shared interest in the transdisciplinary roots of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and their dedication to strengthening the ties between the ESD and education community and the transdisciplinary community in order to contribute to the shared goal of fostering transformative action for sustainability.
During their visit, each of the fellows shared insights into their current research. Alicia Jiménez presented The Earth Charter as one approach for an ethics- and values-based ESD. Charles Hopkins, together with Katrin Kohl, Executive coordinator and Principal Researcher at the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability, York University, Canada, invited the community for a dialogue event focusing on how to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on a local level such as in the town of Lüneburg.
Next to other research activities which included forging new partnerships with local ESD actors, working on a teaching module and outlining a co-authored paper, each of the fellows shared a short, reflective report which can be assessed through tdAcademy’s website.
Charles Hopkins with co-author Katrin Kohl wrote down a brief overview over the transdisciplinary roots of ESD, showing how ESD is an inherently transdisciplinary endeavor and therefore an important and suitable approach to promote sustainability learning and foster societal transformations. >> Click here to read the article.
Alicia Jiménez’ shares her expertise in the application of the concept of the whole institution approach (WIA) for sustainability. The WIA is a way to enhance quality education, bringing perspectives from transdisciplinary research, and how this can contribute to clarifying the path to implement WIA. Her paper was published in Earth Charter Magazine, Vol. 1. >> Click here to read the article.
Although ESD was initially conceived as a transdisciplinary effort, the wording of transdisciplinarity is not prevalent in ESD practice. Alicia’s article therefore presents some considerations about what steps can be taken to implement the WIA and reflect on contributions that transdisciplinary research could offer to the practice of WIA, centering on the argument that educational institutions that aim at generating transdisciplinary research on sustainability could enhance the quality of education they provide if their inner practices are coherent with the sustainability principles and actions.