Multicultural group work on field excursions to promote student teachers’ intercultural competence

Education for Sustainable Development through International Collaboration. A Case Study on Concepts and Conceptual Change of School‐Students from India and Austria on Gender Equality and Sustainable Growth

“…Critical discourses with other learners can contribute to individuals questioning their own non-sustainable actions [31]. For this reason, discourses in small groups are essential for successful learning [3,[10][11][12]15]. A collaborative learning setting enables learners to continuously change their position between acting and observing.…”

“…International school partnerships with partner schools from the Global South in particular frequently run the danger of reinforcing existing clichés and stereotypes among the participants. A classification of one side being humanitarian and generous and the other group being poor and helpless may be supported, leading to a constant updating of global dependency relations [13][14][15]18,19,41]. Disney [20] (p. 7) even emphasizes the danger of 'epitomizing a new form of colonialism' in which the dependency of the South is perpetuated.…”

“…For the common workshops in Austria, learning settings were tailored to these two topics with the focus of enabling an active participation of the students and encouraging intensive discussions between them. To enhance a learning process by dealing with contradictions and dilemmas [15,35], methods such as dilemma discussions [47] and mysteries [48] were chosen. Applying the latter method, small groups of students structure given information (short texts, diagrams, pictures etc.)…”

“…To facilitate far reaching changes of existing concepts, the potential of collaborative learning settings is stressed by several studies [3,[8][9][10][11][12]. However, when conducting an international collaboration, caution has to be taken to avoid perpetuating dependency-relations between the Global North and the Global South [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

Research Collaboration of Austrian and Indian Teenagers in the Context of Education for Sustainable Development

“…Collaboration in general is defined as one of the key competencies for ESD [5]. Collaboration enables and encourages discussions in small groups with the learner's role frequently changing between interacting and observing, which is seen as essential for successful learning [44][45][46]. Through criticism from others, learners start to build more complex and abstract concepts [9,22,47].…”