Conference Agenda

Austria’s largest network for schools and sustainability is ÖKOLOG, which currently comprises 11% (over 690 schools) of the Austrian schools of all types as well as 13 (out of 14) university colleges for teacher education. ECOLOG is a key action programme and network for the sustainable development of schools and education for sustainability. Itwas developed in 1996 by an Austrian team of teachers working on the international ENSI project (Affolder & Varga, 2018). ÖKOLOG is a national support system with the aim of promoting and integrating a sustainability approach into the development of individual schools and attempts are being made to embed the programme in Austria's federal states inter alia by regional networks and a webpage (http://www.ecolog.at).

ECOLOG is structured in three levels to support schools in the ECOLOG program: (1) the coordination by the Institute of Instructional and School Development at the University of Klagenfurt in partnership with the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, (2) nine ECOLOG regional teams (one in each Austrian province) in collaboration with educational and environmental authorities, University Colleges of Teacher Education and various organizations of environmental and sustainability education, and (3) ECOLOG coordinators and teams in all ECOLOG schools (Rauch et al., 2023). Schools analyse the ecological, technical, and social conditions of their environment and, resultingly, define objectives, targets, concrete activities, and quality criteria to be implemented and evaluated. Students and other stakeholders of a school should be involved in a participatory way, and collaboration with authorities, businesses, and other interested parties is encouraged. The measures concern, among others, areas like saving resources (energy, water, etc.), reduction of emissions (i.e., waste, traffic), spatial arrangement (from the classroom to the campus), the culture of learning (communication, organisational structure), health promotion, social learning, as well as the opening of the school to the community (Rauch & Pfaffenwimmer, 2020).

Since the beginning of the ECOLOG-schools network's existence, a series of evaluations, inquiries, and studies have been produced and published both using qualitative and quantitative methods (Rauch et al., 2023).

In this presentation we show the current accompanying research within the framework of ÖKOLOG which focuses on all-day schools. Traditionally, school lessons in Austria are mainly held in the morning. In recent years, all-day schools have gained in importance, not least for social reasons (e.g. parents working). In principle, all-day schools spread school life over the whole day (usually from 8:00 to 17:00) and offer lunch. The structuring of lessons and extracurricular activities at the schools is additive or integrative. About 20% of ECOLOG schools are all-day schools in one form or another. In four case studies at selected ÖKOLOG schools, the extent to which a whole-day organisation of school life can support ESD in the context of ECOLOG is investigated. The research is also part of a current international Erasmus+ Project „SustainAll“ (https://sustainall.eu/en/). The case studies on good practice examples aim to answer the following main research questions: How are Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) projects and initiatives integrated in the all-day schools? What are the characteristics or factors that contribute for an ESD project or initiative to be a good practice example within ÖKOLOG?

The education sector plays a vital role in an economic, social and environmental context since it has the capacity to transform society and educate students to adapt to needs and challenges from different perspectives. A sustainable organisation is becoming one of the most popular and ambitious concepts because environment and organisational performance are closely related and its long-term success depends on the fact how the organisation is able to integrate human capital into the environment (Seivwright & Unsworth, 2016).

International Commission on the Futures of Education (2021) highlights the importance of sustainability for future education, especially in the field of education management, which includes teamwork, collaboration and culture of organisation (International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021).

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) defined by the United Nations (UN) recognize quality education as an integral element of sustainable development (United Nations General Assembly, 2015).

The term of the sustainability of organisation is used as a synonym of sustainable development or organisation’s social responsibility – organisation’s sustainability is based on economic, environmental, social (Bagdonienė, Galbuogienė, Paulavičienė, 2009), political and corporate responsibility aspects/ pillars (Morrissey & Heidkamp, 2022). Combining the five pillars of sustainable development is a complex process that should result in a completely new vision of educational institutions. It raises the necessity for a management structure to encourage and support the sustainability initiatives within the organisation.

Kvelde and Odina (2022) distinguish several development stages for the team to reach the status of a sustainable team in an educational institution starting from a small group of people working together and sharing common interests till the being effective team demonstrating high level teamwork and finally sustainable team working cross-departmentally and centred on adding value to organisations. The data were collected by the content analysis of the education management hierarchy structure reflected on homepages of educational institutions; content analysis of students’ teaching practice assignments on the education management hierarchy structure; interviews with school administration on the state of the art of sustainable team. The current study serves as a continuation of the previous study, in which teachers from the same educational institutions participating, so that as a result of the study, it shows a comparison of the vision of principals and teachers about sustainable team performance in an educational institution.

Latvian National commission of Unites Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation UNESCO (2019) report states that the sustainable development of educational institutions includes four aspects of sustainability, which provide an answer to the question "what to do?". These aspects are: diversity, self-governance, cooperation and active participation.

Given the foregoing, the aim if this article is to explore the concept of the sustainable team of educational institution in Latvia, as well to summarize issues and opportunities for sustainable team performance development in educational institution.

Research questions:

1. What are the problems in building a sustainable team of an educational institution?
2. What factors influence the development of team activities in educational institutions for sustainable development?
3. Which aspects of leadership and teamwork has positive impact for sustainable development in educational institution?

Research objectives:

1. To analyze the scientific literature on education for sustainable development, teamwork, team performance and leadership for sustaimable development.
2. To study international examples of good practice in sustainable team management in educational institutions.
3. To analyze the perception of sustainable team performance of teachers in educational institution in Latvia.
4. To develop recommendations for the development of the sustainable team performance in educational institution.

Sustainable team supports principals in leading their educational institutions towards sustainability, also, achieves institutional goals and cultivates a culture where collaboration, appreciation, and teamwork are valued.

Researchers and policy makers have long advocated the importance of school-university partnerships in improving initial teacher education and bridging the research theory nexus. Across countries such as Scotland, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, Federal policy makers have made significant inroads in developing national program standards for the provision of initial teacher education and within this reform agenda, have been able to establish clear benchmarks in practice. Amongst these program level standards is a focus on school-university partnerships. Conventionally limited to a site for professional experience, schools have now become an extension of the university to become essential alliances.

This paper draws together key themes emerging from a two-year project focussed on identifying and analysing examples of school university partnerships from across the globe including Brazil, Vietnam, Scotland, New Zealand, US, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, Philippines, Italy and Australia. Drawing on examples of school-university partnerships from across six continents and three Australian states, we identify the differences in approaches, challenges and untapped opportunities that have become visible to us as we worked with scholars to explore the sustainability of school-university partnerships within initial teacher education.

Our project sought to examine the following questions:

1. Do school-university partnerships have the potential to transcend organisational and contextual boundaries and present a broader view of the powerful potential of schools and initial teacher education providers when working together?
2. Can school-university partnerships driven by community needs, work together to address social problems, motivated by civic purpose?

The connecting threads of these partnerships and emergent collective themes explore the importance of autonomy, boundary crossing roles and open and fluid communication. The authors discuss the significance of these themes within a policy reform agenda focussed on promoting, sustaining, and safeguarding school university partnerships for the future.

Partnerships in teacher education (TE) is a strategy to work together to resolve a common problem or a problematic context (Baumfield) and current international policy documents state the importance of partnership between schools and higher education (R. Farrell, 2021). How different actors develop partnership is of profound interest.

In Report to Parliament in Norway (2016–2017) a new model for competence development introduced with the intention of creating a closer collaborative partnership between (TE) and schools. The intention is that partnership will contribute to competence development in TE on the grounds of a long- term system for equally cooperation between teacher educators, students, and schools. Ultimately, the partnership will also contribute to bridge the theory - practice gap in TE and make the TE more relevant for the schools. Norwegian policy documents and research imply that the Norwegian TE does not balance practice and theory well enough (Dahl et al., 2016; Finne et al., 2014; NOKUT, 2006, 2010). In addition, the TE has also been criticised for being too distant and less relevant for practitioners (Finne et al., 2014; Svarstad, 2020).

Lillejord & Børte (2016) describe partnership as a strategy to develop and improve the TE and provide new learning for all involving parties. Moreover, they utilize the concept “third space” to explain how the participants within the partnership meet and collaborate. “Third space” describes the possibilities for knowledge building and close collaboration among the interacting participants in the partnership (Folkvord & Midthassel, 2021). On this backdrop, this study seeks to bring forth knowledge concerning the impact of the partnership on TE from a teacher educator`s perspective, both on an individual and collective level. The research question is: How do teacher educators experience and evaluate the impact of the partnership between schools and their own institutions? The aim of the study is to explore the understanding of the teacher educators own actions and outcomes of being a part of the partnership.

The theoretical framework rests on cultural -historical activity theory (CHAT), formulated by Engeström (1987) with the attention on the communication differing perspectives of actors and in what way each actor`s thinking and reflection appear within their contexts. Hence, partnership may be understood as boundary practices and activities that bring together multiple participants with different roles, experiences, and areas of expertise where ideas from research and practice can interact (C. C. Farrell et al., 2022). The theoretical understanding of partnership is drawing on cultural-historic activity by using the concepts boundary crossing and boundary practice (Penuel et al., 2015). Partnership boundaries are referring to the different cultures that characterize the different institutions (Folkvord & Midthassel, 2021). The actions of the participants become apparent within their activity systems. Rather than focusing on each actor`s individual characteristics, CHAT aims more at interactions between actors (Engeström & Sannino, 2021). CHAT seeks to understand multiple dialogues, perspectives and voices of the actors in and activity system, such as TE, interacting with other activity systems, like schools.

This study is relevant for TE programs all over Europe because it investigates the partnership`s impact on the TE from the teacher educators’ point of view. Partnerships deal with cooperation, mutual learning and development, and more knowledge about how the TE can benefit from a long term cooperation with schools is necessary.