International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW)

Digital Learning for Sustainable Development?!

By Amelie Schönhaar, Thomas Potthast and Jasmin Goldhausen

27.10.2022 - The immense challenges and opportunities of sustainable development (SD) - from biodiversity and climate crises to new forms of economic activity and sufficiency-oriented lifestyles - are omnipresent. The central question is how people and their environment can live together and shape society today in order to create livable conditions worldwide today and in the future (cf. KNE 2020). At the Competence Center for Sustainable Development (KNE) at the University of Tübingen we asked ourselves how education (for sustainable development) can also be designed digitally in such a way that these perspectives become tangible for students and they themselves discover ways and possibilities to become active.

At the beginning of 2021, the project "Digital Learning for Sustainable Development" (DLSD) started with the conception of a digital, English-language basic event with the title "Basics of and new Perspectives on Sustainable Development - a digital learning journey". The event consists of plenary sessions (duration: 3h), group sessions (duration 1 ½ h) as well as individual self-learning phases and can also be thought modularized. The idea is to take students on a joint digital learning journey through the complex and diverse landscape of SD topics and transformations.

At the beginning of this journey, students get to know the course, by interactively and discursively dealing with basics of sustainable development (including historical location, conceptual and scientific embedding as well as political Agenda 2030 of the UN with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals) in the 1st Plenary Session.

In the course of the seminar, the students will deepen their knowledge by reading selected literature and prepare themselves as experts for the first group session, in which a moderated and methodically guided discussion of the deepened content will take place. The aim is not only to deepen the knowledge but also to develop a critical and interrogative approach. This is additionally promoted by the design of an individual learning and research diary - more on this later.

In the 2nd plenary session we will be visited by external lecturers who will bring their perspective on SD into our digital learning journey. The lecturers are experts from academia and/or civil society practitioners who will give us insights into their topics and projects. The latter are related to SD-relevant social fields of action and are also directly linked to the SDGs.

For the 2nd Group Session the students will deal with the concept of development and alternative approaches from the so-called 'Global South' from a post- or decolonial perspective. A cooperation with the program "Chat der Welten" (EPiZ Reutlingen) enables us to open a digital space in which the students can exchange with people from the Global South on the topic of critical perspectives on SD and learn from each other at eye level by means of online-based communication. For example, the encounter with the artist and activist Sylvia Falcón from Peru was a highlight for many students. Exciting and profound conversations ensued. The students' learning and research diaries also showed what a great impression the guests left on the students.

The 3rd Plenary Session will directly address the question of the global responsibility of science in teaching and research in the context of SD. In this session, we will again be visited by external lecturers who will provide exciting insights into the challenges and potentials of transdisciplinary, international research and collaboration. Afterwards, the students will work on an assignment: They will research 'good practice' - examples from their immediate environment that in their view make a meaningful and successful contribution to the implementation of SD.

Students will bring their research findings to Group Session 3 and come together in small groups (2-3 people). In these groups, students create posters on selected good practice examples. The posters are submitted via the learning platform "ILIAS" and we integrate them using the digital tool "Workadventure" in a virtual island landscape specially created for this purpose.

On this island landscape we will meet with the students in the 4th Plenary Session to conduct a "Gallery Walk of Opportunities". In gaming style, students can create an "avatar" at the beginning with which they move virtually across the island landscape. When two or more avatars meet at a Good Practice Poster, a chat room automatically opens. In this session, the students become experts themselves, present their posters to each other and talk about the researched projects. This last plenary session will be completed with an interactive and motivating impulse from guests of the nationwide network n e.V. on the topic of "Students as Change Agents".

Alongside this and as part of the course work, students document and reflect on their learning process in a learning and research diary. The students are free in the implementation and design. So far, there has been very positive feedback from the students on this reflective format and a variety of implementations: From handwritten submissions to homepage-like preparations, "Prezis" (a kind of PowerPoint) to a podcast.

At the beginning of the project, we asked ourselves how ESD can also be designed digitally in such a way that global challenges in the context of SD become tangible and can be experienced by the students. Basically, it turns out that it is possible to meet the demands of holistic ESD even in a purely digital teaching-learning format, especially because participants from very different (global) contexts can be brought together in diverse forms of interaction. What remains is the challenge of how the necessary physical-personal relationship to the social and natural environment can be promoted through digital teaching.

Latest news: We are nominated for the BNE University Teaching Award with our NE Basics event "Basics of and new Perspectives on Sustainable Development - a digital learning journey".

For further information please visit: https://uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet/profil/werte-und-visionen/nachhaltige-entwicklung/studium-lehre/dlsd-projekt/

If you have any questions, please contact Amelie Schönhaar: dlsdspam prevention@izew.uni-tuebingen.de