Cultivate agency among all categories of participants—students, educational staff, and societal partners—in transdisciplinary sustainability course design¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 5 claims (5 for) · 2 studies (1 review, 1 qualitative), q2 · 0 of 2 report an effect size · 5 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The review recommends that instructors and course designers attend to agency across all participant categories when designing transdisciplinary sustainability education. It states: "The findings offer valuable insights for instructors and course designers seeking to cultivate agency among all categories of participants in transdisciplinary sustainability education." This includes designing safe spaces, supporting reflection, and building trust-based relationships that help participants manage challenges.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Attention to challenges across all participant groups, since staff and partner experiences are currently underrepresented in research and design considerations

Constraints¶

• The synthesis primarily reflects students' experiences, with staff and partner examples included only where sufficient detail was reported

Target Learners¶

• students in higher education
• educational staff
• societal partners

Target Learning Goals¶

• cultivating agency to navigate transdisciplinary learning challenges
• sustaining engagement with real-world sustainability issues

Affordances¶

• Agency Td Sustainability Framework

Claims¶

• Participants enact agency through others by empowering across participant categories: educational staff empower students, while societal partners and students empower each other [+W]
• Students enact agency toward groups by fostering relational awareness, building interpersonal relationships, holding dialogue, and seeing from other perspectives [+W]
• Students enact agency toward the self by maintaining motivation through embracing uncertainty and learning from mistakes, and by taking time for reflection and serendipity [+W]
• Deeper co-leadership emerges when staff support lets partners progressively take on responsibility, but recedes when staff carry the process [+W]
• Dispositions such as openness and shared responsibility are shaped by conditions, not fixed individual traits [+W]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Weiwei Liu, Valentina C. Tassone, Pascal Frank, Renate Wesselink, Harm J.A. Biemans. (2025). The role of human agency in dealing with challenges in transdisciplinary learning for sustainability in higher education: A scoping literature review. Educational Research Review 49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2025.100747