Action for Sustainability is an action learning program focusing on engaging and empowering the next generation to become change makers in their own lives – and for their surroundings and the world at large. The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are used as a meaningful framework and ‘design thinking’ as the explorative, creative, and action-oriented learning method.

Action for Sustainability provides interdisciplinary teams of educators with a creative, structured and facilitated space to develop, perform, document and disseminate new learning projects, where the students create innovative solutions for the world while learning. The participating teams go through an innovative learning process themselves, strengthening their competences to facilitate open-ended, creative and student-centred learning projects.

The Action for Sustainability learning projects are documented by the teachers and made available on this website so that others can be inspired, use them, and develop them further to meet own needs. We call it pedagogical sustainability to emphasize that sustainability is also about using and sharing the many resources and practices in schools in new and value-creating ways.

The overall ambition with Action for Sustainability is that all students in Primary and Secondary education get to work as change makers and experience the many ways they can contribute positively to the ‘greater good’ of the outside world. It forms them as human beings and strengthens their innovative competences, all the while bringing knowledge from the traditional school subjects into play in meaningful ways. Over time the students will master the entrepreneurial proces of acquiring, applying and creating new knowledge, while working with real world challenges.

Action for Sustainability started with 4 pioneering schools in Denmark in late 2018 and has since spread to many more schools in Denmark and Greenland. More than 400 teachers and 3.000 students have taken part so far. Action for Sustainability also supports the school management in developing and providing a more meaningful, creative and sustainable working environment for the educators.

In the near future, Action for Sustainability will be supported by a new didactic toolbox that is being developed, backed by funding from the EU and the VILLUM FOUNDATION. The toolbox will give educators an easy and free access to a varied range of engaging teaching methods. The ambition is that this will inspire many more educators to pick various sustainability challenges as authentic and meaningful starting points for learning – and thereby support the formation of the next generation as creative and competent change makers.

If you want to hear more about Action for Sustainability or want to get involved, please contact Nicolai Seest on +45 40 89 89 02 / nicolai@andlearning.com.