Suchergebnisse

Purpose
Sustainable development requires multiple stakeholders to work and learn across practices, in other words, it requires boundary crossing competence. To prepare students for their future sustainability professions, higher education should facilitate the development of boundary crossing competence in its curricula. This study aims to confirm whether boundary crossing learning can be stimulated by workshop-based support in multi-stakeholder projects.


Design/methodology/approach
This quasi-experimental intervention study (N = 122) investigates the effect of a series of supporting workshops on students' boundary crossing learning in multi-stakeholder projects. The workshops allowed students to adopt four learning mechanisms (identification, coordination, reflection and transformation) theorised to stimulate learning across boundaries between practices. Students followed zero, one, or two workshops. By analysing the student learning reports, the study examines the effect of the workshop intervention on students' self-efficacy for stakeholder collaboration, the number of reported student-stakeholder collaborative activities and the reported boundary crossing learning mechanisms.


Findings
The results show that a series of two workshops increase the number of reported collaborative activities and activates the students' boundary crossing learning in terms of reflection and transformation.


Research limitations/implications
These findings support the evidence-based design of multi-stakeholder learning environments for sustainable development and contribute to the body of knowledge regarding learning across practices.


Originality/value
Boundary crossing competence receives increasing attention as an asset for sustainable development. The added value of this study lies in its confirmation that the boundary crossing theory can be translated into directed educational support that can stimulate students' boundary crossing learning.

Context: With an increase in cultural diversity in many countries, schools and teacher educators are grappling with the question of what this diversity might bring in vocational education, and how teachers can be prepared to work with this diversity. In order to train and empower teachers who experience tensions because of culturally diverse student populations, it is useful to know whether teachers do have different needs to work with this diversity. This study reports on profiles in teachers' experience of value-based tensions (professional ethics and stance, diversity and communality, respect, personal autonomy, and justice) teaching in culturally diverse classes of Senior Secondary Vocational Education and Training (SSVET).

Methods: This study relied on data from a questionnaire completed by 891 teachers from 20 culturally diverse SSVET schools in the Netherlands. A Hierarchical Cluster Analysis was performed to identify subgroups of teachers that have a similar pattern of responses (profiles) with regard to the different value-based tensions they experienced. Subsequently, the association of the distinguished profiles with the competence elements (knowledge, skills and attitudes) was examined with ANOVA. Lastly, the P-value of the Pearson Chi-Square was examined through cross-tabulation analysis to determine whether the associations between the distinguished profiles and personal and contextual characteristics were statistically significant.

Findings: Hierarchical cluster analysis identified three profiles suggesting that teachers experienced all tensions more or less to a certain degree: Relaxed, rarely tense, or reasonably tense. "Professional ethics and stance" tension was the most frequently experienced value-based tension in all three profiles. The profiles were related to teachers background characteristics. The teachers with a reasonably tense profile work mainly in the lower levels of the SSVET. These teachers reported to have had more training on the topic of multicultural education. Teachers with relaxed profile reported having fewer skills than teachers with medium and reasonably tense profiles.

Conclusion: The current study suggests that the culturally diverse student population creates tensions for teachers in SSVET and - depending on the type of profile - for some teachers more than others. The most frequently experienced tension on professional ethics and stance in all profiles confirms that all teachers experience conflicts with regard to their own norms, values and convictions and those of their students on the one hand, and the standards of the labor market with its own specific requirements for professional ethics and stance as a third party on the other. For teacher educators, the profiles can be useful as a reflection tool during study and professional development, as different groups of teachers have been distinguished and some groups need extra training in all the tensions. In SSVET, teachers with the different profiles could support each other in the process of coping with the value-based tensions.

Purpose
In collaboration with their home cities, universities increasingly develop courses in which students investigate urban sustainability challenges. This paper aims to understand how far-reaching the collaboration with urban stakeholders in these courses is and what students are meant to learn from the transdisciplinary pedagogies.


Design/methodology/approach
This research is designed as a qualitative multiple-case study into the intentions of transdisciplinary courses in which universities collaborate with their home cities: Delft University of Technology in Delft and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions in Amsterdam. The study compares the written intentions of eight courses in course descriptions with the ideal intentions that teachers describe in interviews.


Findings
First, seven of the eight investigated courses were designed for urban stakeholders to participate at a distance or as a client but rarely was a course intended to lead to a collaborative partnership between the city and students. Second, the metacognitive learning objectives, such as learning to deal with biases and values of others or getting to know one's strengths and weaknesses in collaboration, were often absent in the course descriptions. Learning objectives relating to metacognition are at the heart of transdisciplinary work, yet when they remain implicit in the learning objectives, they are difficult to teach.


Originality/value
This paper presents insight into the levels of participation intended in transdisciplinary courses. Furthermore, it shows the (mis)alignment between intended learning objectives in course descriptions and teachers' ideals. Understanding both the current state of transdisciplinarity in sustainability courses and what teachers envision is vital for the next steps in the development of transdisciplinary education.

PurposeBy envisioning the learning environment as an eco-social system, this study aims to map interrelated enablers of students' sustainability-oriented learning (SoL) in the context of a university course at the interface of science and society.Design/methodology/approachA case-study approach was used to delineate what enables student learning in a university-wide transdisciplinary Master of Science course. A sample of 102 students, university and societal stakeholders participated to this study, by sharing their experiences and views through focus groups and questionnaires.FindingsA main finding is the development of a configuration of six intertwined enablers that through their interplay help to cultivate students' SoL, in the course under exploration.Originality/valueThis study paves the way for a re-orientation of how to explore learning in complex environments. It shows that adopting a relational, situated and systems approach is not only feasible but is also desirable to understand and guide learning practices in complex environments.