The collaborative commons: Schools, communities, and society

Živa Kos¹, Veronika Tasner²

¹University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Slovenia

²University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Education, Slovenia

ziva.kos@ff.uni-lj.si, veronika.tasner@pef.uni-lj.si

Education for sustainable development

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the UNESCO report "Reimagining our futures together" are just some of the more prominent documents that place education at the centre of ongoing social change and seek to overcome a growing number of social and economic problems in our world. This paper presents the idea and case studies of schools and local engagement as a possible contribution of education to the various challenges of sustainability today (Kos, Tašner, Gaber 2019). The changes in educational policy and practise that are focused on the local level affect schools at the level of curricula and didactic approaches, at the level of expanded school programmes and broader community engagement. A questionnaire was sent to the principals of thirty elementary school from different regions and in different urban, semi-urban and rural areas to capture existing community engagement practises. Based on the data collected, three schools were selected as pilot schools with the aim of developing school–community collaboration. (Kos, Gaber, Tašner 2021). The selected cases show that liberal conceptualizations of community, collaboration and commons form hybrid hierarchies and classifications and reconfigure the personal and collective experiences of teaching and learning along different axes. This opens up possibilities for alternative ways of addressing one of the most pressing questions of our time: how we can live together in a world of plurality and difference and in a sustainable relationship with our natural environment. It is safe to say that the idea of the commons will continue to evolve in (trans)formal educational practise.

Key words

classifications; different teaching and learning; hybrid economies; reconfiguring personal and collective