ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Knowledge and Skills for 'Making Transformation' – Innovative Approaches to Educating and Training Change Agents in Spatial Planning at Higher Education Institutions

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 08 | EDUCATION AND SKILLS

Speakers

Dr Madeleine Wagner (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT))Prof. Jörg Knieling (HafenCity University Hamburg)

Description

Major global environmental changes present mankind with challenges that can only be solved through the Great Transformation towards sustainable spatial development. The need for transformation arises in all systems such as civil society, the economy, and politics. Changes and upheavals not only occur in social coexistence and behavior, but also manifest themselves in the spatial structure, starting at the local and regional level. Universities play a key role in training future change agents or transformation pioneers for sustainable development. However, it remains unclear what expectations practitioners and university teachers have towards transformative teaching and how a degree program or its individual elements must entail to fulfil these requirements.
This is the context in which our study is situated; it involved examining the orientation towards transformation issues of spatial planning study programs at 25 German universities. Based on document analysis and 36 expert interviews with scientists, students, university teachers and practitioners we discuss, first, the different expectations of various actors towards transformative and transdisciplinary teaching formats, and second, the status of transformative teaching formats already implemented in spatial planning related programs. As result, we propose to evaluate exemplary courses that place transformative and transdisciplinary learning at the center of their pedagogical approach, whilst also focusing on social learning processes of soft skills.
German examples such as the ‘[Q]-Studies’ at HafenCity University Hamburg, or the sustainability-oriented ‘Leuphana Semester’ at the Universtiy of Lüneburg, both compulsory for all students, are discussed against the background of ‘Liberal Art Studies’, in which students learn flexible, interdisciplinary thinking based on real problems and practice applying the problem-solving strategies they have acquired to complex questions from science and practice.
The presented study can enrich the international discussion on future perspectives of spatial planning programs against the background of sustainability challenges with empirical evidence from selected German universities.