FUTE

This collaborative initiative intends to advance and strengthen teacher educators' conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical competence to promote education for sustainable development in teacher education in Finland, Namibia, and Tanzania. The project has planned to progress through three cycles and projected the following outputs and subsequent outcomes to be achieved through its activities.  

The first cycle aims to foster teacher educators' (TE) capacity building through professional development training. TEs from DUCE (Tanzania), UNAM (Namibia), and UTU and UEF (Finland) will participate in the professional development trainings to increase their personal knowledge, content expertise, and pedagogical as well as methodological competence about sustainable development goals (SDG) and education for sustainable development (ESD). The capacity building training package consists of four modules relating to SDG and ESD, summing up 12 ECTS to all participating teacher educators. 

The second cycle will foster teacher educators to continue their work in small teams in each campus to update and re-design their courses to teacher students to fulfill necessary targets of sustainable development and link them to the local needs. The pedagogical updating of teacher education courses also includes the selection of new pedagogical methods and approaches, innovative solutions to support sustainable development as well as appropriate teaching and learning material to use in teacher education courses. 

The third cycle will facilitate STs to apply their learning outcomes from the courses in their teaching practice and plan, implement and assess mini projects of sustainability education in their local community. The student teachers (who have completed the new teacher education courses) participate in teaching practice and plan and implement a mini project in their teaching practice with at least one collaborator in the local community such as schools, parents, local entrepreneurs, or NGOs. The students are supervised by key experts of the project to make their mini project possible and support the students to find collaborators.
 

Key results to be achieved:

1. Strengthened conceptual and educational capacity of teacher educators and competence to renew their individual courses towards sustainable education.

2. Improved pedagogical methods and new innovative solutions created for teaching and learning

3. Student teachers’ sustainability related mini projects with local community partners during the teaching practice is implemented 

4. Sustainable development project activities with project collaborators or with local communities is reflected and assessed