Veranstaltungsprogramm

Against the backdrop of the Grand Challenges, the future prospects of young people are changing extremely rapidly. With regard to the social responsibility of higher education institutions in the sense of the Third Mission, this means that these developments must also be taken into account for students when designing their studies. This requires not only content on sustainable development, but also ways of developing relevant future skills and integrating them into the respective disciplines at curriculum level.

The focus must be increasingly placed on the development of skills, in particular on the newly formulated competence "futures literacy", which was declared an essential competence of the 21st century by UNESCO in 2023. "Futures literacy" refers to the educational content of social challenges and asks for creative, cultural and artistic practices to open up ecological awareness, as described in the anthology "Futures Literacy. Learning and teaching the future" by Carmen Sippl et al. (2023). This also includes the ability to develop visions and to jointly formulate and test concrete solutions through positive images.

Furthermore, it is also about not only adapting curricula, but also responding to the new challenges with new concepts in the sense of a "curricula redesign". These are all tasks that represent a major challenge for higher education institutions, as they are sometimes only able to drive forward developments in the field of higher education teaching and learning slowly due to the nature of study organizations.

With the support of a toolbox, a transformation of higher education teaching and learning is to be promoted through the increased integration of sustainability and education for sustainable development. A cross-university working group is developing recommendations for action, analysis tools and a collection of good practice examples for the individual further development of study programs at curricular level as well as alternative educational programs outside the curricula at higher education institutions (Bernhard et al. 2023).

This futurelab is intended to be a further building block for the continuous further development of the toolbox (see Bernhard et al. 2024) to expand the current focus on Austria and the German-speaking higher education area through an active exchange between representatives of different types of higher education institutions from different countries. Exchange formats of various kinds are intended to enrich the examples of the toolbox, which will expand the expertise at universities to anchor education for sustainable development in teaching (development of so-called "change agents in university teaching").