Veranstaltungsprogramm

Reimagining our futures has become a key concern of contemporary teacher education (International Commission on the Futures of Education (2021). However, it is increasingly framed through competence-based learning (CBL) approaches that emphasise measurable outcomes and market-oriented understandings of education. This paper critically examines whether such approaches can enable emancipatory and transformative learning processes in teacher education.

This paper reflects on the development and preliminary application of a capability-based framework for reviewing curricula and pedagogical practice in teacher education and for informing new approaches. It draws on ongoing conceptual and action-research work conducted since 2018 within teacher education development involving the Provincial Departments of Education of Gauteng and the Eastern Cape (South Africa), Gulu University (Uganda) and the University College of Teacher Education Tyrol (Austria).

The capability approach (CA), introduced by Amartya Sen, has emerged as an alternative educational model, particularly in the Global South (Tikly et al., 2020). It conceptualises development as the expansion of substantive freedoms and provides a normative framework for evaluating social, epistemic and ecological justice. It has been taken up prominently in debates on transformative education, where education is understood as enabling learners and educators to critically engage with, rather than merely adapt to, unjust social and ecological conditions.

Building on debates on decolonising education emerging from the Global South, the framework is grounded in theories of transformative education oriented towards social, epistemic and ecological justice and draws on Walker’s (2012) notion of critical capabilities. These move beyond utilitarian competences by foregrounding questions of power, democracy and social justice, and by emphasising critical reflection, professional judgement and agency to actively shape social, political and institutional arrangements.

Analytically, the framework explores the transformative potential of teacher education by examining student teachers’ capabilities to (1) access teacher education programmes, (2) develop a professional identity and (3) enact a practice that fosters transformative action and critical reflection among teachers and learners. By identifying capability deprivations in the context of teacher education linked to resources, structures and agency, the paper offers insights into how glocal governance dynamics shape—and constrain—the possibilities for teaching for human and ecological flourishing.

In an era of glocalisation, where global and local forces increasingly intersect, lifelong learning has emerged as a critical pathway for community empowerment and sustainable development (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2023). Lifelong learning is also a valuable foundation for an experiential and transformative learning framework in teacher education. This paper applies a lifelong learning lens to evaluate how the teacher education training program at Gulu University simultaneously contributes to community transformation and student competence-based learning. Lifelong learning initiatives at Gulu University have been documented to enhance community capacities by improving livelihoods, strengthening civic participation, and fostering collaborative networks (Lamaro et al., 2024). This paper expands on this to consider how it applies to the goals of the competence-based curriculum in preservice teacher formation.

The paper emerges from a collaborative project between Gulu University and University College of Teacher Education Tyrol seeking innovations in teacher formation through competence-based learning. The authors reflect on community visits, forums related to competence-based learning with preservice teachers, recent graduates, university lecturers, and schools where teachers engage in teaching practice. The authors use reflective analysis to evaluate the intersections of pre-service teachers’ competence-based learning and community transformation. Transformation is conceptualized as a co-produced process in which learners, the university, and community members actively collaborate to identify challenges, generate knowledge, and apply learning to address socio-economic, civic, and cultural issues (Preece, 2017). Collaboration, empowerment, and critical reflection are seen as the mechanisms through which lifelong learning leads to transformative learning outcomes in a competence-based framework.

The paper generates important insights into a model of competence-based learning which is entwined with community transformation and collaborative lifelong learning.

In this contribution, service learning is examined through the lens of glocalization, understood as the dynamic interplay between globally circulating educational concepts and their local reinterpretation, adaptation, and contestation within specific social, cultural, and political contexts. Service Learning exemplifies how global educational ideas are locally embedded and reshaped in ways that reflect existing power relations, institutional frameworks, and societal needs.

The core idea of service learning can largely be traced back to progressive education (Reformpädagogik). Learning is understood as emerging through intensive engagement with real-world problems and the exploration of possible solutions (e.g. Dewey, 1994). Service learning is characterized by activities in which educational goals of higher education institutions and academic interests of students are meaningfully aligned with the needs of civil society and non-profit organizations. It thus combines the acquisition of competencies with the assumption of social responsibility. The learning process includes scientifically grounded engagement with a task at hand, the transfer from theory to practice, and, crucially, the reflection on experiences (Bartsch & Grottker, 2021). As a didactic model, service learning offers significant opportunities for students to acquire comprehensive professional competencies for their future roles as teachers and promises high levels of motivation. At the same time, it enables the implementation of scientifically grounded projects that would otherwise lack sufficient time, financial, or structural resources.

Using case studies (Monk et al., 2023) and survey data from Uganda and Austria (interviews with students and teacher trainers in both countries), the contribution explores how service learning operates as a glocalized educational practice, thus critically reflecting OECD’s competence-based learning as a global norm and its local implementations. By comparing the data of the two countries supporting and inhibiting factors will be analyzed and discussed.

From a critical perspective of power-relations, the concept of glocalization allows an analysis of how service learning may open space for critical reflection on social inequalities and, at the same time, contributes to their reproduction. Students may – unintentionally – act as individual problem-solvers who compensate for systemic shortcomings, thus stabilizing existing power relations both on local and global level. The paper therefore asks whether glocalized forms of service learning enable students to critically engage with structural inequalities across different socioeconomic contexts without becoming their unwitting supporters.