Proceedings of the Conference of Growing up the Future: Education for Sustainability (GROUFES 2026)

Growing up the Future: Education for Sustainability (GROUFES 2026)

📍Magdeburg, Germany🗓️ 5-6 May 2026
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Advancing Sustainability Competences in Teacher Education Through Reflective Practices

Introducing a Concept

Authors
Sunet Grobler1, *
1University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, 6020, Austria
*Corresponding author. Email: sunet.grobler@uibk.ac.za
Corresponding Author
Sunet Grobler
Available Online 23 August 2026.
DOI
10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_19How to use a DOI?
Keywords
Reflective practice; Socratic method; Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4); sustainability competence; teacher education; vignettes
Abstract

This paper introduces research focused on advancing Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) (UN, 2015) within teacher education, which investigates how reflective practices, supported by vignettes (Agostini et al., 2024) and the Socratic method (Delić & Bećirović, 2016; Schiller, 2008), can foster sustainability competences grounded in SDG4 principles among pre-service teachers. The planned research is based on a participatory, qualitative design and is applied in a Bachelor’s-level teacher education course in Austria, where about 15 students participate. The research is structured in four phases: (1) an introductory lecture, (2) vignette writing and analysis with support of the Socratic method, (3) qualitative, semi-structured individual interviews, and (4) cross-analysis of the vignettes, interviews and a reflection tool. The approach aligns with the four key areas of competence development identified by GreenComp (Bianchi et al., 2022) and provides a transferable model for integrating GreenComp into teacher education, supported by vignettes and the Socratic method.

Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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Volume Title
Proceedings of the Conference of Growing up the Future: Education for Sustainability (GROUFES 2026)
Series
Atlantis Highlights in Social Sciences, Education and Humanities
Publication Date
23 August 2026
ISBN
978-94-6239-760-6
ISSN
2667-128X
DOI
10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_19How to use a DOI?
Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Cite this article

risenwbib
TY  - CONF
AU  - Sunet Grobler
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/08/23
TI  - Advancing Sustainability Competences in Teacher Education Through Reflective Practices
BT  - Proceedings of the Conference of Growing up the Future: Education for Sustainability (GROUFES 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 222
EP  - 230
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_19
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_19
ID  - Grobler2026
ER  -