Continuing Education Pathways to Sustainability
Have you ever considered teaching a masterclass to professionals in your field? Would you be interested in teaching to and with practice? Do you aspire to connect your expertise about sustainability to agents of change in practice? Pathways to Sustainability funds Continuing Education initiatives with a budget up to €10,000,-.
Continuing education is one of the key pillars of the transdisciplinary ambition of the Pathways to Sustainability programme. Professionals do not stop learning once they become active in practice. On the contrary, learning never stops, and is particularly crucial when facing the paramount, wicked and interdisciplinary challenges of the sustainability crisis. Agents of change in the sustainability realm need academic reflection and knowledge more than ever. Consider policy makers working with farmers on the agricultural system of the future, spatial planners shaping future cities under the spectre of impending sea level rise, or high school geography teachers who need to understand the science of climate change to educate future generations. Think also of the particular importance of a critical perspective on technical sustainability ‘fixes’, that would enable current professionals to avoid perpetuating existing inequalities.
Pathways to Sustainability wants to enable today’s professionals to bring about positive change in their fields by setting up a sustainability curriculum for professionals. The aim is to equip professionals with the tools and skills to be able to actively engage in creating the change needed for sustainability. With this programme we invite academic agents of change from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds to develop and teaching Continuing Education courses.
Criteria
To support and nurture such new Continuing Education initiatives, we fund initiatives up to €10,000 to develop Continuing Education courses or related initiatives. If you have an idea to educate professionals active in the sustainability transition, please keep the following guidelines in mind:
- a proposal can involve multiple departments or faculties, this is actually encouraged. Do make sure that the initiative lands in one of the departments (‘penvoerder’) and that department board supports your proposal and work on the course;
- the funding can be used to hire staff (e.g. student-assistant), material costs or to fund teaching hours. Note that hours spent on Continuing Education by faculty are part of the teaching load matrix;
- the funding is meant to develop initiatives, not to actually teach them, developing a plan for implementation (including a budget) is part of the trajectory;
- we welcome various didactic approaches: developing a fully new course, converting a master course into a ‘mixed classroom’ or initiating a learning trajectory with one or more stakeholders (‘leergang’), think for instance about a course about Spatial Planning in a Changing Climate with professionals from the water and spatial planning sector or a Mixed Classroom on the Just Transition with students, policymakers, artists and activists;
- with this call, we aim to nurture new continuing education initiatives at Utrecht University; therefore, only teachers associated with UU can apply.
Initiatives developed by/through PtS-communities are of course encouraged, but this is not mandatory.
Evaluation and deadline
The proposals will be evaluated by an interdisciplinary and interfaculty committee, we will work with a rolling deadline and will respond to initiatives a.s.a.p.
Apply by sending the application form to pathwaystosustainability@uu.nl. For advice on budget matters, please contact your local Department Manager/Coordinator of Operations. If you have further questions about the call, or want to explore an in initial idea, you can contact Tom Gerritsen at t.j.gerritsen@uu.nl.