The Core-to-Core Joint Seminar was co-organised by the UNESCO Chair of Education for Sustainable Development and the UNESCO Chair in Research and Education for Sustainable Development at Okayama University and took place from the 13th- 15th of March 2024.
Seminar objectives
The seminar aimed to strengthen collaboration between leading specialists on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Global Citizenship Education (GCED) in higher education, and especially in teacher education, who can contribute to the mission of promoting sustainability learning in both teacher education and across universities more broadly.
Seminar outcomes
- The seminar led to an agreement to form an MoU (memorandum of understanding) to further enhance the ongoing collaboration between Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences and Okayama University.
- To strengthen the work of the Core-to-Core Programme “Formation of Centre of Excellence to Promote Teacher Education for ESD: Towards Achieving the SDGs”
- Participants shared, aligned and reported on best practices in teaching and research on ESD and GCED.
- Young researchers present exchanged research and deepened awareness of international perspectives and approaches in research on ESD and GCED.
- Participants discussed, suggested and recommended different ways to foster higher educational institutions as mission-driven, responsive institutions that generate social impact and address the grand socio-ecological challenges of our time.
Background for the seminar
There is an international recognition and need to reframe education to better enable the sector to realise its potential as an important means of implementation for achieving the SDGs. Collectively, these reports respond to the roles of education at all levels of society, and for higher education specifically they set out a bold path with a mission-driven purpose towards “transforming higher education” and “flipping the science model” to respond to the grand socio-ecological challenges of out time.
Participants
Around 50 participants met at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, at the Faculty of Education in Hamar. Participants consisted of university leadership, professors and lecturers, and young researchers from both universities, and participants from other universities who are partners of their UNESCO Chair networks from Europe, Asia and other regions.
Centre of Excellence to Promote Teacher Education for ESD: Towards Achieving SDGs
Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany), Inland Norwegian University of Applied Sciences (Norway), York University (Canada), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Okayama University have formed a centre of Excellence to promote teacher education for ESD. The program is designed to create world-class research hubs in research fields considered to be cutting-edge and internationally important in Japan and fostering the next generations of trailblazing young researchers.
The overall objective of this research exchange is to share the resources and experiences of teacher education for ESD and propose a global framework of teacher education for ESD in collaboration with a core institution in the Asia-Pacific region (Japan), core institutions in Europe (Germany, Norway and Slovenia) and North America (Canada), sub-core institutions in Africa and Latin America and other cooperating institutions around the world.
For more information about the Centre of Excellence, please click here.
Related links
Contact information
Centre director at the Centre for Collaborative Learning for Sustainable Development
- robert.didham@inn.no
- Phone
- +47 62 59 79 63