Conference Agenda

Addressing the relationship between the built and the natural environment, Birkeland (2008) proposes the concept of "positive development". This concept includes the transition from current vicious cycles to future virtuous cycles through the design of the built environment. From the perspective of the built environment, sustainability is a design problem, since most negative impacts are caused by physical and institutional design practices. Some solutions to specific problems associated with sustainable development can also be reversed by design. Most institutional environmental management tools that seek to solve problems are part of systems planning, design and management that undermine or discourage good practice. These tools are still paying attention to the symptoms of the problems, such as pollution and waste, instead of addressing the causes of those problems and correcting them through appropriate design systems.

The redesign of the built environment needs decision tools to promote diversity, adaptability and reversibility (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) in Birkeland, 2008). According to the author, the built environment is responsible for the largest share of energy consumption, a large proportion of raw material extraction, toxic landfills, production of packaging waste and the emission of greenhouse gases. Also, the built environment contributes to the strengthening of problems such as deforestation, climate change, soil erosion, air pollution, water scarcity and biodiversity loss, all of them related to the quantity of resources, space and energy needed for today and for the future.

With this research, it is expected to bring an overview on the scopes and challenges that diferent “sustainability on campus” initiatives are facing and bring them as a comparative analysis to the current european context. The conceptual framework of the analysis circulates around the Education for Sustainable Development -ESD- approach, which aims to empower people with knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and behaviors to live in a way that is good for the environment, the economy, and society (UNESCO, 2025).

To disaggregate this analysis into positive and negative impacts, the research question aims to address “What are the main scopes and challenges of higher education institutions in the implementation of sustainability on campus initiatives?”. A cross-case analysis has been designed taking into consideration that initiatives to implement “sustainability on campus” in higher education institutions have grown in recent years across the world but the structure and content of these initiatives (conceptualization, definitions, interpretations, and implementation strategies) vary from one university to another (Garrido-Yserte and Gallo-Rivera, 2020).

Deleye (2024), conducted a topic modelling-assisted discourse analysis on the “sustainable university” conceptualization that addressed the relationship between the university, higher education and sustainability. The author identified three dominant discourses and defined them as the “sustainable university discourses framework”: Firstly, the sustainable higher education institution, where sustainability is embedded all over the organizational structure layers and management and institutional strategies represents a relevant role. Secondly, the engaged community, where the university is not considered as an institution but as a community of people that are engaged with sustainability. And thirdly, the green-tech campus, which results as a combination of the previous two with emphasis on the university as creator of sustainable technological innovations. This research considers the third discourse as the starting point for the definition of university campus, which includes its operations and physical infrastructure, its focus on technology and the involvement of students as users of the campus (Deleye, 2024). However, the conceptual framework of the cross-case analysis is broadly immersed within the whole sustainable university discourses framework proposed by Deleye (2024).

The integration of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) within higher education has been widely recognised as a key lever for promoting sustainability-oriented values, practices, and ways of thinking among future generations. Universities are increasingly expected to act not only as sites of knowledge transmission but also as learning environments in which sustainability is meaningfully embedded through institutional cultures, everyday practices, and educational experiences (UNESCO, 2005; Wals, 2009; United Nations, 2015; Barth et al., 2016; Wals & Benavot, 2017; Rieckmann, 2018). Within this context, initial teacher education occupies a particularly relevant position, as pre-service teachers encounter sustainability both as learners in higher education and as future professionals expected to contribute to sustainable societies (Albareda-Tiana et al., 2018; Álvarez-García et al., 2019; Vare et al., 2020).

While policy frameworks and international guidelines emphasise the importance of ESD across educational levels (UNESCO, 2005; Buckler & Creech, 2014), existing research suggests that its implementation in higher education often remains uneven and fragmented. Sustainability initiatives may be highly visible at the institutional level, yet experienced by students as superficial or disconnected from everyday academic practices (Barth et al., 2016; Wals & Benavot, 2017; Holst, 2023). This raises critical questions regarding the extent to which sustainability is not only present but also meaningful within university education, and how institutional discourses around sustainability are interpreted and negotiated by students in their daily experiences.

This paper is situated within a doctoral research project adopting a multiple-case study design across universities in Italy and Portugal, which examines how ESD and Civic and Citizenship Education (CCE) are embedded within pre-primary and primary initial teacher education. Focusing on two Italian universities, this paper explores pre-service teachers’ lived experiences of sustainability within their university education. It adopts a student-centred perspective and investigates how sustainability is perceived and experienced during university training, contributing to current debates on ESD in higher education by foregrounding students’ voices and critically examining the relationship between institutional intentions and everyday practices.

The study presented in this paper is guided by the following research questions:

RQ1. How do pre-service teachers experience and perceive sustainability within their university education?

RQ2. How do pre-service teachers perceive the coherence of institutional sustainability initiatives in relation to everyday university practices?

The overarching objective of the paper is to explore how sustainability is lived by pre-service teachers within higher education contexts, with particular attention to the tensions between visibility and meaningfulness, and between institutional sustainability discourses and students’ everyday academic experiences. More specifically, the study aims to identify how sustainability is communicated at the institutional level, how it is embedded in curricular and extracurricular contexts, and how students interpret inconsistencies between official narratives and daily practices.

Conceptually, the paper draws on literature on ESD in higher education, in particular, research emphasising whole-institution approach for sustainability in education (Barth et al., 2016; Öztürk, 2022; Holst et al., 2024). It also engages with perspectives that conceptualise curriculum and learning as lived and socially constructed processes, highlighting the importance of students’ interpretations of educational environments beyond formal curricular provisions (Casarejos et al., 2017). By combining these perspectives, the study approaches sustainability not merely as a set of declared institutional commitments or isolated initiatives, but as an experiential dimension of university life that is continuously negotiated through everyday practices.

By focusing on pre-service teachers’ lived experiences of sustainability within university education, this paper provides an empirically grounded contribution to discussions on how ESD is enacted in higher education, highlighting the importance of addressing the gap between institutional discourse and everyday practices and between the visibility and meaningfulness of sustainability initiatives for fostering sustainability-oriented learning environments in teacher education.

Transforming schools towards sustainability is widely recognised as a key lever for societal change. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aims to empower learners to actively engage with complex global challenges, yet its effective implementation requires structural, cultural, and pedagogical transformation at the school level. (UNESCO, 2021) Within this process, school leaders play a pivotal role (Holst, 2023) they shape organisational conditions, enable participation, and translate sustainability goals into long-term school development strategies. (Mogren and Gericke, 2017) Despite this central role, empirical research consistently indicates that many school leaders feel insufficiently prepared to lead ESD implementation in a holistic manner, particularly when framed through a Whole-School-Approach (WSA) (Brock & Holst, 2022).

This paper addresses a key gap in current research by foregrounding the importance of school leaders’ own perspectives on which competencies and other factors are needed to successfully implement ESD and how they conceptualise their leadership role in this context. While existing studies often focus on learners and teacher practices or curricular integration of ESD (Holst et al., 2024),comparatively little attention has been paid to school leaders’ subjective understandings, perceived enabling conditions, and role interpretations related to ESD-oriented school development and leadership (Mogren & Gericke, 2017).

The paper draws on empirical data from the LoLE (Leaders of Learner Empowerment) training, a six-month professional development initiative designed to empower school leaders to initiate and lead ESD-related change projects within their schools, which is grounded in principles of action research (Wood & Govender, 2013), peer learning (Vangrieken et al., 2017), and learner empowerment (Hart, 1992) and is being conducted in Germany as well as in seven partner countries (Costa Rica, Ethiopia, South Africa, Canada, the USA, Japan and Saudi Arabia). The empirical focus of this contribution lies on a qualitative survey conducted with participating school leaders from two German LoLE cohorts, addressing enabling conditions and role understandings of school leaders (Warwas, 2012), which is complemented by interviews on the needs of the school leaders regarding the LoLE training and selected qualitative materials from the training context, including written reflections and project descriptions, to contextualise and deepen the analysis.

Preliminary findings indicate that school leaders emphasise enabling conditions, that are not fulfilled yet, on multiple, interrelated levels. These include structural conditions (e.g. time resources, institutional support, and policy frameworks), relational and cultural conditions (e.g. trust, participation, and shared vision), and individual dimensions (e.g. leadership identity, confidence, and perceived legitimacy to initiate change). (Holst et al., 2025) Furthermore, the analysis reveals differing role conceptions, ranging from managerial coordination and strategic framing to facilitative, participatory, and learner-centred leadership practices. (Warwas, 2012) Notably, many school leaders describe a tension between hierarchical leadership expectations, the engagement and the motivation of the collegium and the participatory demands of learner empowerment within a WSA.

This paper contributes empirically grounded insights into how ESD-leadership is understood in the context of schools and enacted from the perspective of school leaders (Holst et al., 2025) The findings have implications for the design of leadership training programmes and the conceptualisation of ESD-oriented leadership competencies. The paper concludes by discussing how professional development formats can better align with school leaders’ perceived needs, including required competencies of the school leaders, and by inviting discussion on how school leadership can be supported better in the future.

Across Europe and internationally, education systems are under sustained pressure to demonstrate improvement in student outcomes, equity, and future-oriented competencies, while simultaneously responding to policy agendas shaped by OECD frameworks, international comparisons (e.g. PISA), and national accountability regimes. Despite this, school reform continues to be characterised by initiative overload, policy churn, and short-lived interventions, producing what has been described as “projectitis” (Adelman & Taylor, 2007) rather than durable systemic change.

Whole-school change (WSC) is frequently proposed in European and international policy discourse as a solution to this fragmentation. Yet, as Thomson (2010) argues, it remains a concept “used in various ways, by different people, for diverse purposes, and [with] distinct appearances and effects in schools and school systems” (p. 11). Empirical research across multiple national contexts suggests that many reforms fail to embed because they are treated as programmes to be implemented rather than as organisational transformations to be lived (Hargreaves, 2008; OECD, 2015; Roffey, 2016).

This paper contributes to European debates on sustainable school reform by examining whole-school change as a systemic, meaning-making process within a secondary school in the UK implementing the Thinking Schools (TS) framework. While TS is now used in multiple countries, it is not studied here to determine its effectiveness, but to provide the context as a locally enacted reform ecology operating under pressures familiar across European systems: accountability, curriculum constraint, staff workload, and performativity.

The study investigates how whole-school change can be conceptualised through the perceived experiences of both Staff and Student Drive Teams tasked with change, addressing three operational questions:

(1) how participants perceive whole school change itself; (2) how they experience their role within the change process; and (3) how they perceive the facilitators and challenges shaping their work.

The theoretical framework integrates systems theory, organisational learning, and autopoietic theory. Following Thomson (2010), schools are conceptualised through the metaphors of ecological systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and learning organisations (Senge, 1990), both of which are widely influential in European school improvement discourse. These are extended through Wheatley’s (1999) autopoietic interpretation of organisations as self-producing meaning systems (Luhmann, 2012; Maturana & Varela, 1980). Within this frame, reform is not implemented but perturbs the system, triggering internal processes of reinterpretation and reorganisation, aligned with Argyris and Schön’s (1978) concept of double-loop learning.

Based on the findings, the paper argues that whole-school change is best understood not as an ‘add-on’, but as ongoing systemic change and a multiple-loop, multi-layered learning process supported by risk-taking, reflection, teams interrelations, non-negotiable whole school change, common values and language, and continuous learning, developed into a ‘petal’ model that merits further attention with direct implications for European debates on school improvement, professional learning, and democratic participation in education.