Future.Ed | Creative Unit on School Culture, Sustainability, and Democracy
Future Trends in Education (Future.Ed) is a research consortium hosted at Leuphana University Lüneburg, the University of Osnabrück, and the University of Oldenburg. Funded through zukunft.niedersachsen — a joint programme of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and the Volkswagen Foundation — the project addresses a central question in education reform: how can civic literacy and sustainability literacy be effectively embedded in schools as whole-school transformations? Future.Ed establishes a longitudinal data foundation tracking competency development and school change across both domains over multiple years, combining a system-level survey with in-depth investigation in selected areas.
The research is organized around five Creative Units (CUs A–F), each working in a co-constructive approach with partner schools and examining a distinct dimension of the Bryk et al. (2010) Organizing Schools for Improvement model: professional capacity (CU A), school learning climate (CU B), instructional governance (CU C), community relationships (CU D/E), and — in CU F — synthesis across the consortium.
Creative Unit F takes a school culture theory perspective. Rather than examining one specific dimension of school development, it asks the overarching question: how do schools engage with sustainability education and democracy education as transformative tasks, at the discursive and performative levels? How do they appropriate these themes, translate them into practice, and what do students learn in schools that have set out on this transformation? As the synthesis unit, CU F also examines the interactions among units A through E, reading the patterns that emerge when the consortium’s findings are brought together. The unit brings together researchers from all three consortium universities: at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Daniel Fischer, Luisa Kahlke and Claire Grauer; at the University of Osnabrück, Christian Reintjes and Till Kaiser; and at the University of Oldenburg, Till-Sebastian Idel and Sven Pauling.
