Educational Research

Curriculum Reform for Sustainability in Higher Education

The Global Classroom project is a teaching and research project, funded by Stiftung Mercator. It included two cohorts of students as well as 18 instructors Leuphana University and Arizona State University. Mainly the search is conducted by Dr. Guido Caniglia, Beatrice John, and Leonie Bellina.

The goals of the research in this project are a transferable model curriculum, a variety of resources for implementing such a “Global Classroom Curriculum” and support the innovation process for new settings in many different teaching contexts. It also seeks to contribute interdisciplinarily to areas of sustainability in higher education, learning studies, competency research, and learning technologies. The qualitative research accompanied the teaching from the beginning. Since June 2015, the research team is analyzing data from formative and summative assessments, evaluation tests, and group interviews in order to get a better understanding of how to innovate and redesign curricula for sustainability in higher education.

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Research focus areas

In three research areas innovation and redesign of curricula are being addressed:

The Curriculum Development evolves around the learning areas and practical planning of these areas.
The Teachinglearning environment deals with the operationalization of settings and formats aligned with the curriculum in global and local settings, facilitated by digital learning.
The environment encompasses the experiencebased learning that highlights the relation between local and virtual environment.

Curriculum Reform and Development

In order to be able to address global sustainability challenges in their manifestations in different local contexts, students have to: (1) critically and creatively understand those challenges and their solutions; (2) be able to take action to move towards solutions; and (3) cultivate an inclusive and positive mindset that enables them to overcome difficulties and collaborate across cultural, social, and disciplinary differences.

With this vision in mind and inspired by R. Barnett’s work on the definition of curriculum, the Global Classroom curriculum prompts students’ engagement in the three dimensions of: (1) Knowing , (2) Acting , and (3) Being . At every steps it asks:

( Knowing ) Which kinds of knowledge, and which ways of engaging knowledge, do students need to creatively and critically address and solve sustainability challenges?
( Acting ) Which skills and competencies do students need to develop in order to address and solve sustainability challenges?
( Being ) What kind of mindset and sense of being(intheworld) do students need to cultivate in order to address and solve sustainability challenges?

In the Global Classroom Curriculum, Knowing , Acting and Being are three equally important dimensions of the same educational experience.

We found five different areas of learning to be necessary for a reformed curriculum, in order to enable
students to build the necessary competencies for sustainabilitychangeagents. Each of these areas of learning contain and address the Knowing, Acting, and Being domains: they are all ‘subjects’ of knowledge, require competencies and skills, and foster reflection and practice of particular ways of being in the world.

To ensure structural implementation of each area’s particular contents and learning goals in the program, the curriculum is structured through learning tracks. These run simultaneously through the entire program, building in depth of learning and complexity of application over time, and are integral parts of class activities, assignments, and coaching.

Raster: Text Teaching and Learning

Innovations in Teaching and Learning Environment

Digital learning, virtual settings, online collaboration play an important role for intercultural and interdisciplinary settings in sustainability education. In the Global Classroom, we conceptualized a teaching and learning environment that utilizes the virtuality in a meaningful way, efficiently transmitting the curriculum and respective competencies.

The environment is characterized by principles of selfdirected, collaborative, interdisciplinary, local/global, and virtual learning at the same time. Students are motivated to transfer and engage the knowledge they learn about through a researchand projectoriented learning format. In our research into this setting we have been

evaluating students’ project results
utilizing survey instruments and group interviews to better understand their development.
Activities, tool and equipment was innovatively combined and experimented with to create spaces and facilities for learning.
Skills and roles that are needed to navigate through this environment and to allow competence
development were implemented consciously for students as well as instructors.

Researching in this area focuses on how to implement a researchbased learning setting that utilizes actively the interdisciplinary, intercultural perspectives. A key role in this setting plays experiencebased learning and collaborative work that foster a specific set of competencies. We develop practical approaches for how to choose and adapt the different formats of coaching and group.

Transfer of the Global Classroom

From the Global Classroom experiment, Leuphana University and Arizona State University created a new, dualdegree Masters Program: Global Sustainability Science, which started with the fall semester 2015.

The main goal of the Global Classroom was to develop a model curriculum that could be transferred to other programs and educational contexts, and adapted to different scales. Instructors and administrators can apply the Global Classroom curriculum to:

different types of programs (from undergraduate to master and PhD programs);
different topics in sustainability (e.g. urban sustainability, conservation, energy);
study programs that wish to add a sustainability perspective into their curricula (from civil engineering to public health)
more generally programs dealing with realworld problems (from international development to public health).
The curriculum can also be applied on different scales, from a single class to an entire program:

Different products support you in creating this type of educational experience:

A Resource Book for Curriculum Development: A practice-oriented, step-by-step, how-to guide to curriculum development from envisioning to designing, and implementing new curricula
An online repository with class activities and assignments for a Global Classroom curriculum
Academic publications: on the curriculum concept, on the Experiencebased Learning Framework, on collaborative competencies for sustainability professionals, on research in international educational settings, and on institutional change
Training modules for teachers, instructors and administrators who want to design new curricula

Contact

Global Classroom
Universitätsallee 1, 21335 Lüneburg
globalclassroom@leuphana.de

For consultancy

Dr. Guido Caniglia: guido.caniglia@leuphana.de
Beatrice John: beatrice.john@leuphana.de
Leonie Bellina: leonie.bellina@leuphana.de