Achieving the UN's ambitious global goals require efforts on many fronts and among all generations. People of our time formulated the SDGs. Nevertheless, if the results are to be lasting, we must maintain our focus and efforts in the future if the results are to be lasting. Therefore, we must integrate SDGs in our educational systems at all levels.
The biggest challenge with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals is probably that the goals leave most people with a feeling of not being able to do very much – if anything at all. This also applies to vocational school students in the green sector and their teachers. Therefore, we must adapt our pedagogy and methods so that they not only support students’ acquisition of well-known knowledge and skills, but also empower them for a future where people must be able to act actively – individually and in groups – to create new knowledge and maintain the behavioral changes that ensure global sustainability.
For the education system, this means that we must break out of the “prison of the classroom” in which we often find ourselves. Many teaching activities should release themselves from the standard principle of “1 teacher for 1 class for 1 hour”. This means that we must bring the present and the future, for which we educate our students, into our educations in the form of stimulating learning activities based on authentic learning and real-life challenges.
ERASDG has been inspired by modern educational methods and tied them together with the basic learning needs that can be set for VET students at EQF3 and EQF4 when it comes to SDG12 (Sustainable production and consumption) and SDG13 (Climate action). We have used a standard format for describing expected learning outcomes developed by the EU-funded LOASA project. In order to asses your students before or after the workshop you may use our stadardized assessment form.
With this as a starting point, ERASDG has developed and tested 4 learning formats, where the students learned about the SDGs in an authentic and challenging setting, where they solved real-life challenges that were set by the project's associated business partners.
The methods used are:
1. Living Lab
2. Gamification
3. Innovation Camp
4. Team Learning.
The Dutch Aeres University of Applied Science in Wageningen has prepared a set of guidelines and checklists for the methods. Read more about the guidelines and checklists below:
