Perceiving Sustainability: A Workshop Concept for Creating Awareness and Building Knowledge About Sustainable Development

Introduction

Sustainable development requires action from every individual around the globe (United Nations, 2015). Hence, individuals play an important role within sustainable development. Therefore, individuals need a basement of international and local awareness around the topic (Pappas & Pappas, 2015) that is fed by reliable knowledge and positive emotions that enable their willingness, force, and guidance on how to behave in the sense of sustainable development (Power et al., 2017). Individuals act as multipliers, as they transport their personal actions in daily, family, and friends’ as well as social’s and business’ life (Ones & Dilchert, 2012) and thus contribute to the Agenda 2030. However, people lack the guidance and skills to act sustainably based on knowledge, awareness, and emotions (Power et al., 2017).

Although sustainable development is present in the media, academia, and education, there is a lack of knowledge about what it is and how it can get accomplished. One reason why there are struggles with implementing action to reach more sustainable-favorable circumstances is its complexity and status as a super wicked problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973). In an attempt to inform oneself, one is rapidly confronted with complex topics, such as hunger, pollution, and education, and solutions to these problems are complex and context-specific as well. Moreover, the finding of solutions takes place at the moment of understanding them, which is the nature of super wicked problems (Levin et al., 2012).

To structure the complex topic of sustainable development, sustainable development goals (SDGs) were formulated by the United Nations in 2015. The SDGs consist of 17 main goals and 169 targets, and they are represented by numerous indicators (United Nations, 2021). On a macro level, global problems are discussed by disciplines such as biology, sociology, politics, and economics, which are able to outline challenges. (Local) experts can specifically precise these problems on the level of nations (Sachs et al., 2019). The means to reach the 17 SDGs are often implemented on the micro-level by, for instance, networks, or organizations but not nationwide. The multitude of instruments and initiatives are thus local and decentralized. Moreover, the question of what is better and what is worse needs to be answered differently according to different contexts (Levin et al., 2012) and multi-disciplinary (Arevalo & Mitchell, 2017). Thus, engaging in and learning about sustainable development is challenging and requires particular circumstances to be fruitful.

In science, sustainability and education deals with creating and implementing sustainable development in existing curricula as well as in extra-curricular learning opportunities to address the challenges of sustainable development being a super wicked problem, complex, and context specific. Learning opportunities need to give orientation to social, ecological, and economic challenges (Elkington, 1994) by tackling individuals’ natural eagerness to learn and develop personally (Rogers, 1983). Learning opportunities and interactive instruments, such as workshops, are required to create awareness and systemically build knowledge about sustainable development (Simon, 2002). Together, these instruments need to prevent frustration caused by the topic’s complexity and fundamentality (DuPuis & Ball, 2013), only then can individuals have positive emotions about being able to deal with the topic of sustainable development in its complexity and context-specificity. The instruments need to inspire learners to continue dealing with the topic and, step by step, try to act in the sense of sustainable development (Kopp, 2013). This in turn would enable the empowerment of individuals to be an active part of sustainable development worldwide as required by the Agenda 2030.