From Sustainability Education to Transformative Education

We want to address a frequent misconception that exists amongst concepts that sound similar yet are very different: teaching about sustainability, sustainable education, sustainability and transformative education.

• Teaching about sustainability refers to including content that is related to Sustainability Theory, for example, teaching about frameworks to assess sustainability, the historical development of sustainability definitions and more, without seeking specific engagement from either the teacher or the learner;
• Sustainable education refers to carrying out educational activities in a particularly mindful way, for example, reducing amounts of paper used in exams, responsibly selecting prototyping materials for experiments in labs, conducting education outdoors, and more;
• Transformative Education is an approach that seeks to combine the points highlighted above with a sense of action and engagement. Transformative education aims at cultivating change agents, who are able to take conscious and responsible decisions and seek to find solutions to grand societal challenges.