Sustainability and me: Potentials of personal and experience-based approaches for higher education for sustainable development

25 years after the World Summit on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, a lively debate on higher education for sustainable development has arisen. The overarching aim is to encourage the acquisition of key competences that enable students to master challenges in individual life practice, professional action and the co-determination of social changes as citizens in a self-determined, self-reliant and reflexive manner. However, the previous pedagogical discussion on the promotion of key competences has been largely reduced to the cognitive dimension of learning. More recently, within the framework of a UNESCO report, demands have been made to counteract a too narrow focus on cognitive learning processes by addressing the affective-motivational dimensions of more prominently. Particularly personal and experience-based approaches are seen as having great potential for this.

The conference explores these potentials and opens a space for an exchange of research results, practical examples and experiences with personal and experience-based teaching-learning approaches in dealing with questions of sustainable development at universities. It is aimed at university lecturers, researchers and students with an interest in the systematization, reflection and scientific development of corresponding approaches in the sense of a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.