Educating ‘Future Professionals’ for Sustainable …
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for student dropout prevention. It allows to integrate social and ecological dimensions of sustainability. As the program gained acceptance with students and faculty,
reaccreditation will establish the program as lecture interlinked course. Situated in
one of the modules of the BA in education at Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany, in its’ institutionalized future, the program can become a micro-innovation for
sustainable development.
Students as Resourceholders and Newcomer Innovators
Especially students can be important partners for institutionalizing sustainability
programs. All over the five years, the program was rated excellent by students. Bastenhorst (2005) suggests, to regard students not as stakeholders, but as resource holders.
In this sense, students will be trained to organize self-organization, to take leadership
and responsibility for others, to develop visions, to create feasible alternatives and
to professionalize in a complex set of relationships. It shows, that Higher Education
can change (Singer-Brodowski 2016, p. 33) and didactically support innovation.
Multiplying Forces by Train the Trainer Strategies
The train the trainers ‘Coaches’ relate to their Co-Coaches and create a common
source of collective learning (Singer-Brodowski 2016, p. 198). They learn reflexivity,
democratic engagement and bargaining. They train to find solutions and to deal with
dilemmas. Especially self-organization supports transformational and transformative
experiences. The students’ self-education approach multiplies effects.
Following Barnett (2012), imagination should flow unconstrainedly, envision new
possibilities and find new languages, new ‘conceptual grammars’. Program implementation of and within Barnetts’ (2012) ‘ecological university’, establishes the
criteria of range, depth, feasibility, ethics, possibilities and emergent properties.
Moreover, the dimension of multiplication needs to be added to this. A one third
training strategy supports the reaching out to the whole cohort of another two third.
Like this, scalability can be strengthened as a design principle for sustainability.
Multiplying forces creates solidarity and engagement, too. Institutionalization of
the train-the-trainer approach leads into an “intentional reconfiguration of social
practices” (Schwarz et al. 2010, p. 167), possibly remaining stable over time.
Implementing Education for Sustainability: A ‘nutshell’ strategy
Bottom up ‘nutshell’ strategies can emergently support the “creeping in” of change
into institutional strategies. ‘Heterotopic’ institutionalizing activities can happen in
small, autonomous ‘cells’ or nutshells, which can’t be easy controlled by the institutions. Nutshell innovations slip through the system. They simply stay in the individual
range of decision and autonomy of professorships and academic workgroups. Like
this, they may be still highly effective regarding their educational and institutional
effects: They introduce the sense of an “embryonic society” (Dewey 1899) and sustainable citizenship education into Academia and Higher Education. For Barnett
(2012) this project is related to sustainability, to ecology and to wellbeing. In the
mode of a multilayer-social movement organization, it develops the nucleus and
nutshell strategy of the ecological “university for others”.
615
for student dropout prevention. It allows to integrate social and ecological dimensions of sustainability. As the program gained acceptance with students and faculty,
reaccreditation will establish the program as lecture interlinked course. Situated in
one of the modules of the BA in education at Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany, in its’ institutionalized future, the program can become a micro-innovation for
sustainable development.
Students as Resourceholders and Newcomer Innovators
Especially students can be important partners for institutionalizing sustainability
programs. All over the five years, the program was rated excellent by students. Bastenhorst (2005) suggests, to regard students not as stakeholders, but as resource holders.
In this sense, students will be trained to organize self-organization, to take leadership
and responsibility for others, to develop visions, to create feasible alternatives and
to professionalize in a complex set of relationships. It shows, that Higher Education
can change (Singer-Brodowski 2016, p. 33) and didactically support innovation.
Multiplying Forces by Train the Trainer Strategies
The train the trainers ‘Coaches’ relate to their Co-Coaches and create a common
source of collective learning (Singer-Brodowski 2016, p. 198). They learn reflexivity,
democratic engagement and bargaining. They train to find solutions and to deal with
dilemmas. Especially self-organization supports transformational and transformative
experiences. The students’ self-education approach multiplies effects.
Following Barnett (2012), imagination should flow unconstrainedly, envision new
possibilities and find new languages, new ‘conceptual grammars’. Program implementation of and within Barnetts’ (2012) ‘ecological university’, establishes the
criteria of range, depth, feasibility, ethics, possibilities and emergent properties.
Moreover, the dimension of multiplication needs to be added to this. A one third
training strategy supports the reaching out to the whole cohort of another two third.
Like this, scalability can be strengthened as a design principle for sustainability.
Multiplying forces creates solidarity and engagement, too. Institutionalization of
the train-the-trainer approach leads into an “intentional reconfiguration of social
practices” (Schwarz et al. 2010, p. 167), possibly remaining stable over time.
Implementing Education for Sustainability: A ‘nutshell’ strategy
Bottom up ‘nutshell’ strategies can emergently support the “creeping in” of change
into institutional strategies. ‘Heterotopic’ institutionalizing activities can happen in
small, autonomous ‘cells’ or nutshells, which can’t be easy controlled by the institutions. Nutshell innovations slip through the system. They simply stay in the individual
range of decision and autonomy of professorships and academic workgroups. Like
this, they may be still highly effective regarding their educational and institutional
effects: They introduce the sense of an “embryonic society” (Dewey 1899) and sustainable citizenship education into Academia and Higher Education. For Barnett
(2012) this project is related to sustainability, to ecology and to wellbeing. In the
mode of a multilayer-social movement organization, it develops the nucleus and
nutshell strategy of the ecological “university for others”.