Students in Possession of the Issues of Tomorrow: An Innovative Student-Led Course Project

This article describes an educational experiment, a student-led course called "Learning in Sustainable Development" offered at the teacher training programme at Stockholm University, Sweden. Its purpose was to foster empowerment and action competence among teacher-students in the field of education for sustainable development (ESD). The course content included methods for using case studies to teach issues of ethics and values in ESD. The course was designed to involve students in a democratic process so that the course content changed with the needs and concerns of each class. The students especially appreciated the practical and methodological teaching ideas and the way the course closely related to the needs and concerns of the everyday lives of teacher-students. By including two students in planning and developing the course, a bottom-up perspective was obtained and students felt ownership of the content.