The labor market is facing accelerating changes due to ecological challenges and the related increasing efforts towards sustainable development. Preparing learners for the world of work now requires an understanding of what skills workers will need to adequately address these changes. To deal with this issue, the research community has started to define “sustainability competences” and “green skills” to support educationalists and decision-makers to better manage the impact of sustainability on future jobs. However, in the current literature, the difference between “sustainability competences” and “green skills” is not clear. The aim of this article is to highlight the differences between the two concepts in order to support the dialogue between the various disciplines that address these topics. This paper is a scoping review that provides an outline of the scientometric analyses of publications in the field of sustainability, from the earliest in 1998 up to July 2023. Although the terms are interrelated, using the R package for analysis shows that “green skills” tends to refer more to specific environmental technical skills, while “sustainability competences” are primarily defined as key competences to promote the different dimensions of sustainability, i.e., competences useful for holistic human development

This special issue focuses on the theoretical, empirical and practical integrations between embodied cognition theory (EC) and educational science. The key question is: Can EC constitute a new theoretical framework for educational science and practice? The papers of the special issue support the efforts of those interested in the role of EC in education and in the epistemological convergence of EC and educational science. They deal with a variety of relevant topics in education and offer a focus on the role of the body and embodied experience in learning and educational settings. In conclusion, some further topics are suggested that will need to be investigated in the future, such as a critical evaluation of the possibility for an epistemological alliance between educational theory and embodied cognition, and the contribution that enactive cognition can provide to educational systems, organizations, institutions and policies.

Following the severe impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education systems in Europe, the EU has been called upon to provide a concerted response to the crisis in a context where member states provided their own diverse responses. Against this background, the aim of this article is to uncover and critically examine the EU’s education policy discourse and promoted narratives since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and by doing so evaluate the EU’s response-ability for education recovery during the crisis. A conceptual framework has been devised to analyse the responsiveness of an international entity, such as the EU, based on organisational and neo-institutionalist theories. Data were collected through a combination of discourse analysis and computer-assisted content analysis, which was applied to official EU education policy documents published in 2020. The following categories emerged from the analysis process, indicating that the EU perceives education recovery as: “upskilling and reskilling”, “digital transformation” and “sustainable development”. The findings suggest a substantial continuation between the EU’s pre- and post-Cov-id-19 strategy in the education sector, and even an acceleration in the same direction, revealing a lack of real change in the EU’s response, which was focused predominantly on the economic and employability approach to education.

After outlining the central role of leadership for individual and interorganisational learning in sustainable Professional Learning Networks (PLN), this article describes Austria’s professional learning environment and professional learning (PL) within this changing field. In order to meet urgent institutional requests for sustainable PL, new organisational responses are needed. The authors highlight the implications of the notion of responsiveness, framing it as resulting from interorganisational practices such as PLNs and as ensuring sustainable organisational leadership capabilities within PLNs. After describing the two levels of the study (meso and micro), the findings, which are based on two case studies in Austrian schools, show that the role played by PLNs in challenging professional learning environments is blurry. The discussion shows that these case studies have extended the single-level approach deployed in previous studies. The article concludes by highlighting the specific leadership role that is required within PLNs in order to establish responsiveness, change routines and thus enhance professional learning.

In this article, we provide a theoretical conceptual analysis of FridaysForFuture (FFF) and of its effort in promoting the governance of socioeconomic transition toward sustainable development. FFF is a social movement that has received outstanding public recognition and visibility across the world in the last 2 years and is of great interest to educational research because it is largely composed of youngsters and appears to play a paideutic role in societal innovation. There is a growing but still limited body of investigation of FFF’s structures, genealogy, and behavior. The same goes for its theoretical and ethical background and principles. Its efforts to promote social change by going beyond individual agency toward collective agency deserve greater attention from educational scientists. We argue that FFF is a complex, self-organizing, informal network, which we define as an enactive network for its ability to retrieve scientific knowledge and transform it into lived meaningful knowledge, and for its capacity to mobilize masses and influence public discourse under a specific ethical umbrella. We provide six macro categories to describe and explain FFF: 1) nested emergent network, 2) collective social agency and leadership, 3) political impact, 4) science-based learning and activism, 5) paideutic function, and 6) ethical (normative) stance. We stress the FFF capacity to recruit high-level scientific knowledge without direct support from schools, and embody strong ethical stances with specific references to the ethics of responsibility and care for the interaction between humanity and the natural world. Finally, we suggest that FFF can be interpreted as an enactive network with the ability to affect collective identity and empower collective agency by encouraging communities into a more scientific, evidence-based, and ethical public discourse.

This study focuses on the design and implementation of the Teacher Education and Sustainability Scale (TESS), an instrument to assess the professionalism of teacher educators in relation to sustainability in the context of Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite the importance of the SDGs, there is very little research on the identity of teacher educators in relation to sustainability. The Teach4Reach 2.0 project, an international collaboration between the University of Pretoria, the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, aims to fill the research gap in the quantitative measurement of this key area by examining the professionalism of teacher educators in relation to sustainability in order to strengthen their identity. The TESS questionnaire was developed in a structured four-stage process that initially included AI-generated items and was followed by expert refinement and a testing phase with participants from Austria and South Africa. The findings discuss the process of developing the TESS questionnaire and include a critical reflection on AI and on the need for targeted professional development for teacher educators in the field of sustainable development.