Co-creation of sustainability education: 'made by students'

Allowing space for the students as co-creators is viewed as a novel pedagogical approach1 2with particular gain for teaching in interdisciplinary cohorts, from embracing new aspects of participatory content creation, empowering young researchers to informing educational content with state-of-the art ideas, and rendering content relevant to the classrooms of the future. At the University of Strathclyde, a number of projects are currently underway that adopt a co-creation model: from the design of an undergraduate module in the School of Psychological Science and Health and a postgraduate interdisciplinary module on Nature-based solutions at the Centre for Sustainable Development, new space is created for staff-student collaboration through empowering students as co-creators and giving them equal role to staff, as content generators.

The paper will describe the process and lessons learnt from establishing those co-creation projects on novel educational resources development for both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, focusing on the role of tutor and students as co-creators (3) and moving on to discussing challenges and benefits for both, aiming at supporting the effective application of this model across more higher education institutional settings. Such teaching and learning experiences form part of the university’s approach to integrating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in learning both in terms of adoption of pedagogical innovations but also in terms of new content development. ESD aims to equip people to develop the skills and competencies to play an effective part in real-world action for sustainable development, often by employing transdisciplinary processes of learning and action (4;5). Finally a critical review of links to ESD competencies integration through this co-creation approach is included here opening up the discourse for new ways of co-developing content that can support learning for sustainability from a bottom-up approach.