Future-oriented teacher education: Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the school of the migration society
The project "Future-Oriented Teacher Education: Education for Sustainable Development in the School of the Migration Society" is being conducted by Barbara Pusch (RPTU, Institute for General Education Science, Department of Intercultural Education) and Michael Zimmer-Müller (RPTU, zepf). It aims to examine and promote the perspectives of teacher education students with regard to sustainability and migration-related diversity.
Sustainability and migration-related diversity are crucial topics when it comes to shaping our future. Various educational policy documents at both international and national levels address the associated challenges (UNESCO 2006, 2020; KMK/BMZ 2016; KMK 2013). Over the past decades, a number of educational concepts have developed in both areas, some of which are now outdated, based on different societal models and pursuing sometimes contradictory goals with various approaches. In the field of sustainability, BNE has replaced traditional environmental education and integrated key aspects of global learning (Gräsel 2018); at the same time, BNE is characterized by different understandings of sustainability (e.g., strong and weak sustainability) and different understandings of BNE (Sinakou, Boeve-de Pauw & Van Petegem 2019; Vare, Scott 2007). In the context of flight and migration, the educational approaches in the German-speaking world range from assimilation or foreigner education to classical intercultural education, and include various newer approaches such as migration pedagogy (Mecheril et al. 2010), the pedagogy of intercultural affiliations (Nohl 2014), as well as intersectional and post-migrant approaches (Yildiz, Hill 2015). Against the backdrop of the sustainability goals of the UN used in ESD, a connection between the two areas in teacher education is obvious (e.g., SDG 4 and 16).
Teachers play a central role as "change agents" for both sustainability-oriented education and inclusive, non-discriminatory, and anti-racist education in a migration society (Koskela & Kärkkäinen 2021; Leeman & van Koeven 2019). Although sustainability and societal pluralism in migration societies represent two central future topics and cross-cutting tasks for schools (KMK/BMZ 2016; KMK 2013) and are also brought together in the 2030 Agenda, they have rarely been considered together so far. The few contributions that encompass both fields primarily focus on the social dimension of sustainability (Garcia-Arias, Corbetta & Baronnet 2023; Lasonen 2009) and thus overlook the interplay of social, economic, and ecological dimensions of sustainability ‒ as outlined in both the "weak" and "strong" sustainability concepts. This is not only the case in Germany but also internationally (Pusch 2021, 2023a, 2023b; Catarci 2021). Therefore, it is not surprising that these two future-oriented educational focuses are rarely considered together and linked in teacher education. The project "Future-Oriented Teacher Education: Education for Sustainable Development in the School of the Migration Society" addresses this desideratum and is divided into three sub-projects.
In the first part of the project, the online survey "Perspectives of Teacher Education Students on Future-Oriented Educational Issues" will be used to examine the views of teacher education students at the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) at the intersection of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and education in a migration society. The survey consists of 34 open and closed questions/items and was conducted at the beginning of the summer semester 2024 using the web application SoSci Survey. All teacher training students (approximately 5,000) in the 96 teacher training programs at RPTU were invited to participate via internal university mailing lists. The aim was to obtain an initial overview of the attitudes of teacher training students at the intersection of Education for Sustainable Development (BNE) and education in a migration society.
Duration: January 2024 – June 2025
Financing: Own funds
Project Management: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Barbara Pusch & Dr. Michael Zimmer-Müller
Publications and Lectures:
Pusch, Barbara, & Zimmer-Müller, Michael (submitted): Future-oriented Teacher Education: Linking Education for Sustainable Development and Education in a Migration Society. In: Perspectives on Teaching. Journal for Higher Education and Academic Development.
Pusch, Barbara, & Zimmer-Müller, Michael (2024, November 29). Future-oriented teacher education – Education for Sustainable Development in a migration society? First results of an online survey among RPTU teacher education students. Workshop "Further Development in Teaching," RPTU Campus Kaiserslautern.
Pusch, Barbara, & Zimmer-Müller, Michael (2024, October 24-25). Student potential for ESD at RPTU. First results of the online survey: Perspectives of teacher education students on future-oriented educational issues from the summer semester 2024 from the project: "Future-Oriented Teacher Education: Education for Sustainable Development in the School of the Migration Society." Poster presentation at the symposium "Transformative Education in Higher Education Contexts: Potentials – Conditions for Success – Action Strategies," Salzburg University of Education Stefan Zweig.
Pusch, Barbara, & Zimmer-Müller, Michael (2024, August 27–30). Wie nehmen Lehramtsstudierende Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung und interkulturelle Bildung wahr? Erste Ergebnisse einer in Deutschland durchgeführten Umfrage. [Conference presentation]. The European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), Nicosia, Cyprus.
Group discussions with teacher education students form the empirical basis for the second subproject, in which the orientations of teacher education students at the intersection of Education for Sustainable Development (BNE) and migration society are to be reconstructed using the Documentary Method (Bohnsack 2021) in order to generate deeper insights into the action practices and knowledge contexts of future teachers.
Duration: January 2025 – June 2026
Financing: Own funds
Project Management: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Barbara Pusch & Dr. Michael Zimmer-Müller
The call for sustainability is unmistakable in the Anthropocene. As part of the study "My Ecological Footprint: Education for Sustainable Development in the Intercultural School," students from diverse backgrounds reflected on their ecological footprints and identified everyday practices and orientations that align with sustainable development. The research project took place within the framework of the Campus School initiative of the University of Koblenz-Landau and pursued four goals: First, students with a migration background, in particular, should be made aware of their practical and cultural potentials for sustainable action, thereby strengthening their sustainable actions. Secondly, the pilot study should serve as relevant preliminary work for a comprehensive educational science third-party funded project on sustainable everyday practices in the immigration society. Furthermore, feedback on the research results was intended to provide the involved educators with new impulses for their practical work, and it was planned to incorporate the project into teaching.
Partner school: Integrated Comprehensive School Landau (IGS)
Duration: April 2020 – August 2021
Financing: Own funds
Project Management: Acting Prof. Dr. Barbara Pusch
Publications:
Pusch, Barbara, & Horne, Christopher (2022). Our Common Future Today: Environmental and Sustainability Orientations of Youth in the Palatinate. In: Educational Yearbook 2021 "Future – Today," pp. 251-264.
Pusch, Barbara (2023). In the Shadow of the Fridays for Future Movement: Overlooked Environmental and Sustainability Knowledge of Youth with Different (Familial) Migration Experiences. In: Heinemann, Alisha/Karakaşoğlu, Yasemin/Linnemann, Tobias/Rose, Nadine/Sturm, Tanja (Eds.): DGfE Congress Volume "Entgrenzungen". Opladen: Budrich, pp. 207-219.
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) now addresses various target groups with diverse projects and offerings. Although an insufficient reach to migrated people is noted, an increase in environmental and ESD measures for people with migration and refugee backgrounds has been observed since at least 2015/16. However, there is currently no systematic overview of this growing field of practice, which is why only sporadic information from BNE actors at the intersection of organizational development and discrimination critique is available so far. In addition, there is a lack of educational research, which is why there is little knowledge about how people with a migration background are addressed by BNE actors and how the offerings for this target group are designed.
The project "BNE in the Migration Society" addressed these questions thru an online survey. Thru the newsletters of the Association for Nature and Environmental Education (ANU) and the German UNESCO Commission, a total of 3,000 BNE actors were invited to participate in the survey. The aim of the survey was to provide an overview of this growing field of practice.
Duration: April 2023 – October 2023
Cooperation partners for the distribution of the survey: Working Group on Nature and Environmental Education (ANU) and German UNESCO Commission
Funding: Own funds
Project Management: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Barbara Pusch
Publications: Pusch, Barbara (2023). Summary of the online survey "BNE in the Migration Society." Available at https://zenodo.org/uploads/10254906 [Accessed: December 31, 2024].