What kind of inter/trans-disciplinary (ITD) educational tools and approaches can support and improve sustainability education in the realm of urban transitions?

Event and engagement preparation and workshop facilitation, including co-creative methods, it’s always an exciting task. Here we leave some hints about the forthcoming workshop that will be held on 17-18 February 2020 in the Humanity UNESCO Heritage site of the Valentino Castle in Turin, Italy.

It will be part of both an international conference hosted by TrUST, and a sequence of workshops that SHAPE-ID, a EU H2020 funded project, is organizing across Europe: Dublin (2-3 December 2019), Edinburgh (20-21 January 2020), Bilbao (23-24 March 2020), Warsaw (20-21 April 2020) and Zurich (14-15 May 2020). These workshops engage researchers and stakeholders inside and outside the academic world, to address societal challenges and innovation issues underpinned by the UN 17 SDGs. They are structured as “learning journeys”, starting on the morning of the first day and ending at lunchtime the second day.

Invited participants are experts from different disciplinary perspectives. They will be engaged in a “writing exercise”, structured around research questions in gradually deeper stages, and aiming to formulate a collective position statement. This will include practical recommendations on the inter/trans-disciplinary educational approaches useful for the concrete realization of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the urban context, usable by all actors of urban transformations. To enhance the workshop impact, the position statement can be further developed in a co-authored paper on a high-impact factor journal.

Stay Tuned!

International Conference on Sustainable Development 2019

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Thanks to the TrUST project , co-funded by #distpolito and supported by Patrizia Lombardi, Polito Sustainable and #rus, our principal investigator, Giulia Sonetti is here at ICSD2019 presenting two contributions: one is with Caterina Barioglio Daniele Campobenedetto about "The Italian path toward SDGs implementation: a first mapping exercise". We draw a proper map of current SDGs actions inside the Italian Network of Sustainable Universities and everybody liked it a lot.

Besides that, here at the #icsd2019 / international conference on #sustainabledevelopment , we share problems and success stories about the pedagogy and the delivery methods for #sustainabilityeducation , #training and #outreach. The #trust project is walking the talk and hopefully generating more ripples!

Vertical Literacy, Innovative teaching and the 21st-Century University

This blog is to update the TrUST community about forthcoming actions, interesting publications about inter/trans-disciplinary research and education tools, connected blogs and ideas about the vision of the future university & the sustainability transition challenge. In the next week, three of the TrUST members (Giulia Sonetti, Isabella Lami and Sara Monaci) will be attending the Presencing Institute Foundation in Person Programme in Berlin. The Presencing Institute was founded in 2006 by MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Lecturer Otto Scharmer and colleagues in order to create an action research platform at the intersection of science, consciousness, and profound social and organizational change. Over the past two decades, they have developed Theory U as a change framework, led cross-sector leadership, change and innovation initiatives worldwide, and created an innovation platform called u.lab. In Berlin, we will be learning how to tackle the challenge of building the 21st-Century University. “The difficulties in implementing the Paris Agreement and the SDGs worldwide are not caused by a knowledge gap. The problem is lack of political will and a knowing-doing gap: a disconnect between our collective consciousness and our collective action. This gap leads us to collectively create results that nobody wants: massive environmental destruction, societies breaking apart, and social media-induced mass separation from our deeper sources of self.” TrUST shares the same starting point of Otto Scharmer when defining the lack of “vertical literacy” in the current university system. These 4 days of intensive introduction to concepts and practices of Theory U, a social technology for helping to bring about profound innovation and change, will bring in TrUST new capacities for generating breakthrough possibilities around innovative transdisciplinary strategies.