Citizenship, Social Values and Ethics in Sustainability Education
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Citizenship, Social Values and Ethics in Sustainability education aims to explore key ethical concepts and perspectives useful in education for sustainable development, with a particular focus on social sustainability issues. This includes critical analyses regarding the concepts of civics, and citizenship, and human rights in relation to such aspects as gender, ethnicity, religion, and interactions with nature both historically and in contemporary times. Citizenship, Social Values and Ethics in Sustainability education addresses the role and responsibility of education, in highlighting ethical perspectives and challenges related to sustainability and how norms and values are expressed in relation to dimensions of social sustainability, such as power, justice and equality.
The main aim for the Learning Community is, consequently, to highlight and critically analyse from a transdisciplinary and cross-campus lens with students the educational strategies for the study of challenges, as well as opportunities, for the development of a knowledge based, democratic sustainability education. Students will engage in discussions and analyses where various dimensions of environmental ethics are in focus, discussions and analyses that are developed in seminars where students affiliated at the universities represented in the Learning community come together for mutual collaboration. This collaboration is also developing practical projects such as thematic excursions in/to/at the physical and cultural environments of the different higher education institutions and the communities in which they sit.
Researchers who are affiliated at the different universities are invited to give lectures on themes in which ethics and values are highlighted with regard to sustainability education.
Learning Community Activities
Past Events
Panel Roundtable Recording November 15th , 2022 (LC Citizenship, Social Values and Ethics in Sustainability Education). The panel roundtable was informal and conversational in nature, chaired by the lead, with the idea of exploring how their courses address citizenship ethics and social sustainability, the opportunities seen and the challenges. Participation for the roundtable was already confirmed by
Participants: The partners: Sally Windsor (GU) Olof Franck (GU), Naomi, Maruška (UoL) and Lela Melon (UPF) and EUTOPIA central curriculum team
Modality: Online and recorded. A video recording and audio recording is available. The video can be chunked for different purposes. The transcription of the recording is not available yet.
First edition of EUTOPIA LU EUTOPIA LU 'Citizenship, Social Values and ethics in sustainability Education, coordinated by Sally Windsor & Olof Franck (UoG)—cross-EUTOPIA-connections to be discussed & prepared.
How to get involved?
(Students and educators)
Contact the EUTOPIA curriculum team: Jo Angouri (J.Angouri@warwick.ac.uk) and Karen Triquet (karen.triquet@vub.be)
Learning Community Members
Lead: Olof Franck (GU). Email: olof.franck@gu.se
Olof Franck is a Professor of Subject matter education specialising social sciences, and Associate Professor of Philosophy of religion. His research and teaching interests mainly belong to the fields of religion education, ethics education, ethics, philosophy of religion and religious studies, as well as ESD with a focus on social sustainability. Olof’s latest publications deal with issues concerning intercultural religious education and ethics education, conceptions of ethical competence in educationally relevant contexts, constructive critique of religion and philosophical platforms for developing ethics education. He belongs to the research environment KRUF (Critical Educational Research) at the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies. My teaching is mainly in courses within the International master’s program in ESD, in the Pedagogy program and in postgraduate education, with a focus on, for example, research ethics. Olof is engaged in various contexts where religious didactical and pedagogical issues are in focus, for example as Chair of the Association of Teachers of Religious Education (FLR), as a Swedish representative on the board of The European Forum for Teachers of Religious Education (EFTRE) and in several Swedish and international networks.
Sally is a Senior Lecturer in the IDPP. Having come from Australia, she spent a number of years lecturing at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education where she taught Educational Foundations, Pedagogy, Geography, Indigenous Education, and the Sociology of Education to preservice teachers. Currently Windsor teaches Education for Sustainable Development courses, International and Global Education and educationalresearch methods courses Sally’s research interests include inequality and the unequal provision of school education, sustainability education in schools, social sustainability, international teacher workforce and policy comparisons, and the implications of globalization on school education.
Waldo Galle is visiting professor and the academic policy coordinator on sustainability transitions at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and associate researcher for the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO). As a member of the research groups VUB Architectural Engineering, and Business Technology and Operations, he studies the financial and socio-technical feasibility of a circular construction economy. He questions which opportunities the transition towards that economy raises, which constraints it creates, and how the architectural practice changes together with it. Trained as an architectural engineer (Ghent University, 2011) and doctor in engineering (VUB, 2016).
Dr. Bieke Abelshausen holds a PhD in Educational Sciences – profile Adult Education researching participation in sustainable environmental management programmes with a strong focus on the need for contextualizing sustainable development programmes, citizenship, knowledge systems and stakeholder participation. Dr. Bieke Abelshausen currently holds research and teaching positions at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Specifically, Dr. Bieke Abelshausen teaches in an Institute-wide course (IBO) called Sustainability: an interdisciplinary approach (6ECTS). She is a guest lecturer in two courses called “Agogical dimensions of sustainable development” and “Social and cultural transition strategies for Sustainability and Development” and act as a teaching assistant in the Institute-wide course (IBO) “Reason and Engage (Redelijk Eigenzinnig). In both IBOs she organizes transdisciplinary Participatory Action Research projects (Community-Engaged Research and Learning (CERL) with societal actors. As an interdisciplinary researcher and teacher, Dr. Bieke Abelshausen has backgrounds in Socio-cultural studies, Human ecology and Educational Sciences. Her expertise includes – integrated environmental management, including participation and sustainability, state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative research methods in social sciences, stakeholder engagement in environmental management.
Lela Mélon, a former Marie Curie Research Fellow at the PompeuFabra University in Barcelona, has a legal and economics background. Currently the Executive Director of the Planetary Wellbeing Institutional Framework, she is specialized in EU law, with the main focus on corporate law and sustainability, on which she published the book Shareholder Primacy and Global Business (Routledge 2018). She is currently researching policy coherence for sustainability at the EU level, focusing on corporate law policies as well as the issue of strategic use of public procurement and the sustainable transition of higher education. Besides being active in the academic field, she created and implemented a three-step systemic approach towards sustainability, which entailed the insertion of separate sustainable corporate law courses in academic curricula and a simultaneous sustainable revision of the existing and well established academic curricula in economics and law.
a Maruska Nardoni is a young research fellow at the Centre for Social Studies of Science and a teaching assistant at the Department for Cultural Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana). Her background is in academic philosophy and sociology. Her PhD thesis focuses on researching different forms of monetizing digital data inside the platform economy ecosystems and more importantly, on how current developments in the data industry and its respective technologies (e.g., the means of data collection, the already collected data, its re-use and machine learning models) can be repurposed from exclusively commercial use to more sustainable ends. She hopes to further engage herself with machine learning on a more practical level, primarily in the field of social sciences.
Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. Her research sits at the intersection of continental philosophy, sound studies, and the environmental humanities, and she teaches an interdisciplinary Master’s module ‘Listening to Urban Waters’ that uses field-recording methods to study environmental justice. The author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017) and Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), she is currently finishing her third monograph, Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (forthcoming with Cambridge UP). In 2019–20 she was a Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude.
Olof Franck is a Professor of Subject matter education specialising social sciences, and Associate Professor of Philosophy of religion. His research and teaching interests mainly belong to the fields of religion education, ethics education, ethics, philosophy of religion and religious studies, as well as ESD with a focus on social sustainability. Olof’s latest publications deal with issues concerning intercultural religious education and ethics education, conceptions of ethical competence in educationally relevant contexts, constructive critique of religion and philosophical platforms for developing ethics education. He belongs to the research environment KRUF (Critical Educational Research) at the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies. My teaching is mainly in courses within the International master’s program in ESD, in the Pedagogy program and in postgraduate education, with a focus on, for example, research ethics. Olof is engaged in various contexts where religious didactical and pedagogical issues are in focus, for example as Chair of the Association of Teachers of Religious Education (FLR), as a Swedish representative on the board of The European Forum for Teachers of Religious Education (EFTRE) and in several Swedish and international networks.
Sally is a Senior Lecturer in the IDPP. Having come from Australia, she spent a number of years lecturing at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education where she taught Educational Foundations, Pedagogy, Geography, Indigenous Education, and the Sociology of Education to preservice teachers. Currently Windsor teaches Education for Sustainable Development courses, International and Global Education and educationalresearch methods courses Sally’s research interests include inequality and the unequal provision of school education, sustainability education in schools, social sustainability, international teacher workforce and policy comparisons, and the implications of globalization on school education.
Waldo Galle is visiting professor and the academic policy coordinator on sustainability transitions at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and associate researcher for the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO). As a member of the research groups VUB Architectural Engineering, and Business Technology and Operations, he studies the financial and socio-technical feasibility of a circular construction economy. He questions which opportunities the transition towards that economy raises, which constraints it creates, and how the architectural practice changes together with it. Trained as an architectural engineer (Ghent University, 2011) and doctor in engineering (VUB, 2016).
Dr. Bieke Abelshausen holds a PhD in Educational Sciences – profile Adult Education researching participation in sustainable environmental management programmes with a strong focus on the need for contextualizing sustainable development programmes, citizenship, knowledge systems and stakeholder participation. Dr. Bieke Abelshausen currently holds research and teaching positions at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Specifically, Dr. Bieke Abelshausen teaches in an Institute-wide course (IBO) called Sustainability: an interdisciplinary approach (6ECTS). She is a guest lecturer in two courses called “Agogical dimensions of sustainable development” and “Social and cultural transition strategies for Sustainability and Development” and act as a teaching assistant in the Institute-wide course (IBO) “Reason and Engage (Redelijk Eigenzinnig). In both IBOs she organizes transdisciplinary Participatory Action Research projects (Community-Engaged Research and Learning (CERL) with societal actors. As an interdisciplinary researcher and teacher, Dr. Bieke Abelshausen has backgrounds in Socio-cultural studies, Human ecology and Educational Sciences. Her expertise includes – integrated environmental management, including participation and sustainability, state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative research methods in social sciences, stakeholder engagement in environmental management.
Lela Mélon, a former Marie Curie Research Fellow at the PompeuFabra University in Barcelona, has a legal and economics background. Currently the Executive Director of the Planetary Wellbeing Institutional Framework, she is specialized in EU law, with the main focus on corporate law and sustainability, on which she published the book Shareholder Primacy and Global Business (Routledge 2018). She is currently researching policy coherence for sustainability at the EU level, focusing on corporate law policies as well as the issue of strategic use of public procurement and the sustainable transition of higher education. Besides being active in the academic field, she created and implemented a three-step systemic approach towards sustainability, which entailed the insertion of separate sustainable corporate law courses in academic curricula and a simultaneous sustainable revision of the existing and well established academic curricula in economics and law.
Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. Her research sits at the intersection of continental philosophy, sound studies, and the environmental humanities, and she teaches an interdisciplinary Master’s module ‘Listening to Urban Waters’ that uses field-recording methods to study environmental justice. The author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017) and Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), she is currently finishing her third monograph, Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (forthcoming with Cambridge UP). In 2019–20 she was a Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude.
