This course aims to help you develop your understanding of sustainability thinking in education and its role in societal development towards more sustainable futures. It emphasizes the normative and value-based challenges of educational approaches to sustainable development.

The course introduces the interconnectedness of the Earth's systems, both locally and globally, in relation to socio-economic structures. Sustainability challenges and the role of education in sustainable practices will be explored.

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Transcript of Records

University of Stavanger

Sustainability thinking in education

Resilient communities

Energy and sustainability

Circular economy

Critical and innovative thinking

Inter-personal skills

Media and information literacy

Global citizenship

Ten years after the Brexit referendum, the world is an uncertain and divisive era, and politics is becoming more deeply polarising than ever before. 

We experience communication bubbles and practices, often delegitimizing political and social opponents. There is a growing need to adjust to such political and social conditions regardless of political affiliation. Hence, the course offers you the opportunity to develop their negotiating skills in deep political polarisation.   

Negotiation models usually assume rational exchanges of arguments based on the interests of the involved parties. It can be in the form of game theory or deliberative democratic models. Polarization brings new conditions for political, social, and economic negotiations, where there is very little common ground, deep opposing interests, and an emphasis on emotional arguments that provide immediate political agency.    

The traditional class format often struggles to keep pace with a rapidly changing political and social environment. Hence, this module offers a board game as an active learning experience for you to enhance your educational and social skills in the context of growing political polarisation.  

Following the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum, the micromodule will use the ‘How to Win Brexit?’ educational board game to deliver its aims and learning outcomes. It is a dynamic, role-playing, strategic political board game designed for anyone passionate about politics, negotiations, leadership, and decision-making. 

The course will allow you to self-reflect on Brexit itself, but also extrapolate this experience into other political scenarios that involve deep polarisation - like Trump-era trade, political or climate change negotiations.  

The game is professionally produced, featuring engaging elements such as cards, boards, tokens, and 3D figures of Brexit-era politicians.    

No prior expertise in Brexit or politics is required. You will be provided with meticulously crafted materials to navigate the negotiations.

Motivation letter is a personal statement and it might include a brief introduction of yourself, explanation why are you interested in the learning opportunity you are applying to, any relevant experience or skills that you have, your goals and how this opportunity will help you achieve them, This document should not be more than 400 words.

Motivation Letter

Negotiating Politics in Deep Polarization

Intra-personal skills

Intercultural skills have been recognized as the top-valued skills for not only employers in various industries but for education from the earliest age. Multilingualism goes hand in hand with intercultural competencies, and is already a stated goal for EU-education and a need in increasingly diverse working and living contexts. Therefore, the aim of the course is to explore and critically evaluate the key issues in research on intercultural competence and multilingualism, especially from the standpoint of teacher education and foreign language teaching, by working with a range of art-based research techniques.

Art-based Research Methods in Intercultural Competence and Multilingualism

Exploring, analyzing, and using various research methods

Entrepreneurship, technology and innovation

This micro-module examines the ways in which digital technologies and media shape individual identities, social structures, and cultural practices. 

It highlights both the formative influence of digital environments on mindsets and opinions, and their creative affordances. 

Through hands-on engagement and the role of producer rather than consumer, participants develop practical insights and a deeper critical understanding of society as well as their own positioning within it.

a man sitting at a desk with a computer and headphones

Creative Hearts and Digital Minds

Media Literacy and building Resilience in a Digital World

This challenge addresses an often-neglected dimension of diversity and inclusion which is ‘age’, particularly ‘minor age’. Adultcentric bias can create barriers in recognizing the capacities of children and youth to contribute to society as they can be pre-judged to be ‘incompetent’ or ‘not-yet developed’ due to their age.

Raising critical self-awareness of adultcentrism among adults in educational contexts can support them to develop more age-inclusive attitudes towards children and youth in daily life. However, this process of raising critical self-awareness related to one’s own adult age can bring up emotional responses e.g., fear, guilt, insecurity, denial etc. that can create obstacles in the learning process of adults and might worsen intergenerational differences.

The central challenge in this course is to implement a game to be used by adults to raise the awareness of the psychological concept of ‘adultcentrism’ among adults in educational relationships with children and youth. A key ethical question in developing a game for this purpose is whether the design of such a game is age-sensitive towards adult learners.

Illustration of a person in different stages of life

Game the bias: Adultcentrism in Educational Relationships

This challenge asks you to propose future solutions that could help historians write about child and youth contributions to the early 21st-century climate movement. 

Although children and youth play important roles in social change, their voices and age remain marginal in most historical research. The difficulty often lies in the limited access to sources about and created by children and youth.

You will therefore engage, investigate, and propose ideas for how future historians could better capture these contributions and forms of activism.

Illustration of child at a climate strike

Childism and Archiving the Climate Movement

In the theme of stress theory, key mechanisms in the theory will be highlighted. Furthermore, attention will be drawn to how we can understand, manage, and cope with stress related to working with challenging behavior, both among students/children and staff. 

Theory and research on the brain's functioning and structure will be addressed. Understanding the brain's structure and functioning will be emphasized to create a connection between theory and practice concerning the condition-dependent functioning of children and staff. 

Theories on stress and brain functioning will be interconnected to establish a deeper understanding of the behavior of children, youth, and staff.

How do we understand challenging behavior?

Stress and regulation - new perspectives on inclusion

This micromodule introduces you to autoethnography and post-qualitative research methodologies, emphasizing personal experience, reflexivity, and critical inquiry beyond traditional qualitative frameworks. 

Autoethnography invites researchers to systematically explore personal experiences and narratives to reflect broader social, political, and cultural contexts. 

Post-qualitative approaches challenge conventional qualitative research paradigms by challenging notions such as ‘data collection’ while emphasizing ethical complexity, relationality, and emergent understandings.

Beyond Self: Autoethnography and Post-Qualitative Research

This course aims to help you develop your understanding of sustainability thinking in education and its role in societal development towards more sustainable futures. It emphasizes the normative and value-based challenges of educational approaches to sustainable development. The course introduces the interconnectedness of the Earth's systems, both locally and globally, in relation to socio-economic structures. Sustainability challenges and the role of education in sustainable practices will be explored.

This micromodule introduces childism as a critical lens for questioning adult-centered assumptions in knowledge, policy, and practice, and explores how it can reframe responses to global challenges. 

You will engage with childism as theory and praxis alongside related concepts such as Child Perspective and Children’s Perspective. Through themes of climate justice, intergenerational responsibility, migration, activism, and democratic futures, the module examines how adult normativity shapes knowledge production, sustainable development, and welfare systems. 

Rather than simply adding children’s voices, childism challenges the structures that marginalize them, calling for a reimagining of justice, democracy, and sustainability beyond adult norms.

Childism and Contemporary Global Crises

Challenges to one’s life and living can be disturbing as they raise questions of what it means for one to be human. 

To take on another’s or one’s own challenges requires traits and skills. 

This course enables professionals of human care to jointly explore issues of life and death, illness and wellness, freedom and responsibility, relation and isolation, meaning and meaninglessness, worth and unworthiness, happiness and misery, by training multiple skills and traits for existential and ethical dialogues.

So, we join the conversation of Wisdom and Prudence in Francesco Rustici’s painting above.

Painting titled Wisdom and Prudence by Francesco Rustici

Existential and Ethical Dialogues

Enquiring Life-Issues Together

For a century, writers have used playful, experimental, and game-based methods for thinking about literature. 

Recent interest in game-based teaching has opened the door to bring these methods into the classroom.

In this course, we will study these creative reading and writing games and then build our own! The games can be either digital or tabletop, so no expertise is required.

Illustration photo of protoype of tabletop game

Design and Play Educational Creative Writing Games!

Practical Challenge Designing Educational Creative Writing Games

In today's rapidly changing and increasingly complex world, it is essential to move beyond merely accumulating information. We must actively focus on equipping our children with knowledge, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, creativity, and emotional intelligence. These skills will help them process and understand the vast amounts of information they encounter and enable them to adapt, thrive, and lead in this dynamic and challenging century.

This course is designed to enrich students' knowledge and skills so they can use mathematics as a tool to support and develop children's thinking abilities. Through a combination of theory and practical application, students will learn to integrate mathematical concepts in engaging and meaningful ways, thereby enhancing children's analytical abilities, problem-solving competence, and critical thinking. This will ultimately contribute to green transition by equipping children with the tools to make thoughtful choices regarding sustainable alternatives for the community. 

This course has as one of its unique features the fact that it is developed entirely within a kindergarten, where theory and practice will be in constant exchange. The theoretical instructors from UiS and the kindergarten teachers from Sande Barnehage will be partners in leading the course.

Children's Thinking in Kindergarten Daily Life

Supporting Children’s Thinking Skills and Confidence Through Engaging, Practice-Based Learning

This study module aims at enhancing cultural awareness as a key skill in Early Childhood setting.

Globalization has the last decades turned national and local communities into migrant societies. ECEC is an institution in which children, guardians, parents, and staff from various backgrounds and with multiple belongings meet. This gives ECEC a key role in creating inclusion and belonging in dynamic communities influenced by local and global concerns.

The course will enrich students' knowledge and skills for leading and guiding processes of creating belonging in children's groups, cooperating with a diverse group of parents/guardians. Finding practical, enjoyable, and efficient ways of working as professional staff requires high level of intercultural competence.

Critical Cultural Awareness in Migration societies

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

In this micro-module, you are challenged to design an educational escape room that teaches the core principles of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL): Engage, Investigate, and Act. The escape room will serve as a hands-on tool for educators seeking to implement CBL effectively in their own classrooms.

Design an Educational Escape Room

An educational escape room designed to teach the core principles of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL)

From reimagining urban mobility to better mealtime experiences in nursing homes and greener university campuses, today’s sustainability challenges are multifaceted, spanning technological, social, and environmental dimensions. Responding to these requires not only technical solutions but also human-centered and context-sensitive approaches. 

This course aims to empower students to become change agents through Challenge-Based Learning. Working collaboratively in an international and multidisciplinary setting, you will engage with a real-world sustainability challenge and co-create solutions that are responsive to people’s everyday routines and the specific needs of their contexts. 

Throughout this process, you will contribute to shaping more sustainable futures while developing key competencies in collaboration, systems thinking, and service innovation.

Smart & Green

Co-creating Sustainability for People & Places

Societies across the globe are in dire need to decarbonize their energy systems and to switch to renewable energy production, a transformation generally known as the green transition. 

Whereas the motivation for this energy transition is particular – anthropogenic climate change – the transition from one energy source to another is not unique. Throughout history, societies have harvested different energies and transitioned from one energy carrier and system to another, such as from organic to fossil materials. 

In five thematic modules, you will learn about energy transitions through the lens of energy history and their wider implications for nature, societies, and cultures. You will explore energy transitions as a concept and as a political, social, and environmental reality. And you will learn about the importance of studying energy and energy transitions in history.  

This course will teach you that energy transitions not only are technological but also societal and cultural transformations. As such, Histories of Energy Transitions will be valuable for anyone from sciences, technology, engineering, humanities, education, and arts who are interested in energy issues.

Black transmission towers under green sky

Histories of Energy Transitions

*Nature & Nation* is an environmental history of Norway since 1850. Through five thematic modules, students will learn about the history of modern Norway seen through the lens of environmental interactions and concerns. The course will explore themes such as ideas of nature, the rise of sustainability discourse, resources production, formation of national identity, and coping with changing climates.

Drawing on a wide range of resources from historical sources, art and visual culture, and fieldwork, the course allows students to engage with cutting-edge environmental history theoretical and methodological approaches while remaining accessible for students who have not previously studied history.

This course would be valuable for students who are interested in Norway as a place and who want to know more about how environments are shaped by both the local and the global.

two people standing on edge of cliff at daytime

Nature & Nation: An Environmental History of Norway Since 1850

Simulation in health care education is a learner-centred approach to enhance the transition of theory to practice and to prepare students for work life. The facilitator role is essential to promote reflection, especially in the debrief.  

In this course, you practice the facilitator role and learn to apply this pedagogical strategy to take ownership and create your own learning pathways through problem-solving techniques. Additionally, the module employs the Challenge-Based Learning (CBL framework). The CBL framework facilitates learning through engagement in relevant real-world issues.  

**What is SimBegin?**

A facilitator course, level one, where you will learn to independently run simulation training through practical challenges and reflective thinking. The tool CORE is used to structure the simulation training.

Two women simulating a health scenario with a baby

SimBegin® – facilitator course to run student-led simulation training in health care education

Learn to run simulation training with premade scenarios and practical challenges.

We experience several forms of silence in the course of our everyday lives, even if we are seldom pausing and reflecting about the impact that silences have in our communication with others, in our sense of connection with ourselves, others, and the environment. Therefore, silence can impact our well-being and in this micro-module students will, through challenge-based learning, strategically and critically reflect about the role of silence in communication, connection, and well-being.

Silence is a superpower: Exploring silence and well-being

Qualitative methods and application

Ultrasound is rapidly becoming an essential tool across a wide range of clinical disciplines—not just radiology. 

For Healthcare professionals such as physicians, nurses and paramedics, point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) enables faster diagnostic assessments, enhances patient safety, and supports more informed clinical decision-making at the bedside. 

This micro-module offers a concise and practical introduction to the fundamental principles and applications of ultrasound in everyday clinical practice. It is the first step toward integrating ultrasound into your clinical skill set—empowering you to deliver safer, more efficient, and evidence-based care.

Illustration showing a person using ultrasound on a patient

Introduction to the Use of Ultrasound for Healthcare Professionals

Empowering Clinical Practice with Point-of-Care Ultrasound

We are living through a period of rapid global extinction, called the Sixth Mass Extinction. Animals like the great auk, Tasmanian tiger, and passenger pigeon have all become recently extinct. This course will offer an interdisciplinary examination of extinction in the last 300 years.

How did scientists first discover that species could become extinct? How uncertain are extinctions? How are extinction histories told in museum exhibitions? How do cultures engage with extinction in literature, film, and art? How are nature conservation projects trying to avert extinction?

The course will be taught online in a flexible and innovative format to allow you to engage with extinction through multimedia sources.

This course will be valuable as you face a world undergoing environmental change and will give you the tools to understand the cultural context of past, present and future extinctions.

The Sixth Mass Extinction

Understanding our Contemporary Biodiversity Crisis

This transdisciplinary course will put doctoral fellow candidates at the front of knowledge, and with participatory research skills for research based on empathy, compassion and meaning. We offer this course in the believe that universities are not only to prepare doctoral candidates on how to do research, but to prepare scholars to do research that is implemented in ways that helps others and contributes to the better good in the world, and in accordance to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Empathy, Compassion and Meaning

Theory and participatory approaches

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) lets us solve the governing equations for fluid dynamics for complex engineering problems. CFD is today used in a wide range of industries, some examples are:

- Air resistance for airplanes and cars
- Wind and wave loads on buildings and marine structures
- Heat- and mass transfer in chemical processing plants
- Consequence modelling of fires and explosions in the oil- and gas industry

These challenges require handling complex geometries and turbulent flows. For a robust numerical solution, one needs to understand how to create an unstructured grid and how turbulence can be modeled. The course is divided into the following modules:

- Turbulence modeling
- Generation of unstructured grids
- Aerodynamics
- Heat transfer
- Multiphase flow
- Advanced turbulence modeling
- Development of numerical solvers

The first two modules are mandatory. You will choose additional two modules based on your own interest.

Applied Computational Fluid Dynamics for Industrial Processes

As the world grapples with urgent environmental challenges, the campus emerges as a powerful hub for innovation and sustainability, offering students the opportunity to lead transformative change, shaping sustainable practices that will resonate far beyond the university and into the future.

Utilizing challenge-based learning (CBL) as an innovative approach, we emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration, merging insights from diverse fields to address real-world sustainability challenges. Participants will engage in problem-solving activities, working in teams to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) as a powerful tool for developing sustainable services that support the green transition on campus. By fostering critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration, this challenge prepares students to become proactive, informed agents of change in the pursuit of a more sustainable future.

Smart & Green: Leveraging AI to Empower Students as Change Agents for Sustainable Universities

This challenge addresses an often-neglected dimension of diversity and inclusion which is ‘age’, particularly ‘minor age’. Adultcentric bias can create barriers in recognizing the capacities of children and youth to contribute to society as they can be pre-judged to be ‘incompetent’ or ‘not-yet developed’ due to their age.

Raising critical self-awareness of adultcentrism among adults in educational contexts can support them to develop more age-inclusive attitudes towards children and youth in daily life. However, this process of raising critical self-awareness related to one’s own adult age can bring up emotional responses e.g., fear, guilt, insecurity, denial etc. that can create obstacles in the learning process of adults and might worsen intergenerational differences.

The central challenge in this course is to implement a game to be used by adults to raise the awareness of the psychological concept of ‘adultcentrism’ among adults in educational relationships with children and youth.

A key ethical question in developing a game for this purpose is whether the design of such a game is age-sensitive towards adult learners.

The participants work in a Challenge Based Learning framework to propose a game designed for raising critical self-awareness i.e., of adult-centric biases, among adults in educational relationships with children and youth. The activities include readings, podcasts, teamwork, lectures and workshops. Participants will work part-time, digitally, over a period of three months. There will also be the opportunity for a 5-day visit to the University of Stavanger, but this part can also be attended online.

Illustration showing many people, starting with a small child, child, youth, and adult.

Game the Bias: Challenging Adultcentrism by Design

How can communication in educational settings give all children opportunities to participate creatively? This micro-module explores how educators in settings characterized by diversity can facilitate inclusive communication guided by democratic values.  In this course we will focus on possibilities and dilemmas in professional development in educational settings – primarily early childhood education.

Member university

University of Stavanger

Member university

University of Stavanger

Learning opportunities of University of Stavanger