The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have shed light on the concept of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) expressed through the knowledge of targets and indicators. Consequently, UNESCO has invoked the adoption of new pedagogical approaches for SDGs-that is, transdisciplinary and transformative learning, to overcome mere knowledge teaching and to teach, new generations of young leaders, ESD skills such as envisioning, critical thinking and partnership building. This paper discusses the struggles and successes of a pilot project in transformative learning in an institution of higher learning for the advancement of the SDGs. This project has been carried out at the University of Torino (UniTo) and focuses on merging sustainable development with open innovation. Recognized as one of the best practices regarding sustainable development by the Italian Association of Universities for Sustainability (RUS) in 2017, the case involves students in a transdisciplinary, creative and open learning environment. With this approach, students learn about SDGs, the complexities of sustainability and the use of valuable tools to contribute to their local communities and organizations.
The authors employed a longitudinal in-depth action research method to explore the implementation of organizational learning in an Asian national police force. They aimed to get an interpretive, in-depth understanding of the related processes of transformational change, as well as the barriers to change, in a machine bureaucracy with entrenched structure and culture not ordinarily conducive to learning and adaptation. Second, they aimed to explore the applicability of universalist change management prescriptions in this context. The authors found several structural and cultural barriers to transformational change that were nevertheless being successfully contested through a bottom-up participative change process, the existence of change champions, experiences that challenged the prevailing culture, and change actions that were congruent with the organization's authorizing environment. Second, they found that universalist change management prescriptions may not always be relevant because the nature, task, and culture of an organization influence what approaches are appropriate and applicable.Effective organizational learning (OL) is widely seen as a key to sustainable competitive advantage and necessary for organizational survival (De Geus, 1988;Nonaka, 1991;Schein, 1993;Senge, 1990aSenge, , 1990b as well as a potent way of meeting the strategic challenges of the organization and of even redefining its boundaries (Baldwin, Danielson, & Wiggenhorn, 1997). Developing OL capabilities is not an easy task, 361 We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. We contributed equally to this article.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.