Keynote title: Carving space for sustainable futures through VET: why and how organizational choices and teaching practices matter.
Sustainable futures require major changes to how we organize, approach, and conduct our lives. Education plays a crucial role in this. However, as David Orr noted already three decades ago, education must be designed thoughtfully, or it risks equipping learners’ to be "more effective vandals of the earth”. In this keynote, I explore what VET for sustainable futures might look like – what are some critical foundations, what changes are needed, and which potentialities already exist within the contexts of Nordic VET? Drawing on my research into teaching and learning for sustainability, and the interplay between educational design, organizational choices, and value regimes, I discuss how these factors shape what education can achieve. I discuss the need to design education and teaching that encourages students to develop both generic and vocation specific sustainability competencies, and contrast this to some of the current patterns and systems that contribute to ecological unsustainability and/or social injustice.