The Global Classroom Experiment.Challenges and opportunities in international and interdisciplinary education for sustainability

Sustainability challenges, from loss of biodiversity to epidemics and violent conflicts, need to be addressed by concerned citizens, who are able to (1) critically understand the complexity of the world, (2) take action in appropriate ways to address those challenges and (3) collaborate in different settings. Yet, it is increasingly clear that there is a mismatch between the learning opportunities provided by traditional education (or by new educational platforms such as MOOCS), and the critical, transformative and collaborative qualities that enable graduates to address urgent and complex sustainability problems in different work and research environments. In this talk, we show how we have crafted an new curriculum in higher education for sustainability in The Global Classroom experiment, a three years educational experiment that involved: two universities (Arizona State University in the USA and Leuphana University in Germany), four institutes (Sustainability, Cultural studies and Life Sciences) more than fifteen faculty members and over seventy students. The Global Classroom focused on topics of urban sustainability revolving around the question: “Sustainable Cities. A contradiction in terms?” and provided an intercultural, collaborative, interdisciplinary and research-based learning environment to students from both Germany and the US coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, from psychology and urban planning to biology and environmental sciences. We focus here on the best educational practices we developed in order to facilitate the development of basic sustainability competencies (from systems thinking to collaborative and normative competencies) in flipped-style classroom, research projects in virtual environments as well as virtually facilitated plenary classes. Finally, we talk about strategies to export these formats into different institutional settings, cultural contexts, and disciplinary fields.