At the approximately 8,000 vocational colleges and schools in Germany, apprentices are qualified to work in 340 occupations, but, as yet, the topic of sustainability hardly plays a role. This is something Andreas Fischer, professor for occupational and business education and business didactics at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, wants to change. Until early 2016, with his project BBS futur 2.0, he intends to establish a nationwide network of vocational colleges in order to redesign the schools and the curriculum with the help of teachers.
Has the topic of sustainable development not yet reached the vocational colleges in Germany?
Andreas Fischer: Optimistically speaking, it has. Yet when I cast a critical glance at the curricula, that is, the lesson plans, the picture changes. Often, there is a preamble, the Sunday sermon, so to speak. It states that the students are to be trained for sustainable development. Yet when reviewing the teaching and learning content, the matter is rather bleak. One would have to do a lot of interpreting in order to find a sustainability notion in there.
Does this mean there is a lack of practical implementation in the curricula?
The curricula provide no concrete guidance on how to address the topic of sustainability. Yet there exist plenty of possibilities for doing so. We researched this with our students. 30 to 70 per cent of learning content can be linked to sustainability. But this requires the effort of interpretation. And that is not explicitly stated.
This means, the teachers themselves have to get active?
At the vocational colleges one can repeatedly find teachers who try to integrate sustainability issues into their lessons and to interpret the curricula in a corresponding manner; the rule of thumb is that about every tenth teacher does that. Yet we have found out that these teachers tend to be rather lone wolves. They are idealists who are committed to sustainable education. We now intend to connect them with each other. The innovative aspect of our approach is: we do not wait until any kind of commission has bestowed its blessing on new curricula. We work on the principle that due to this networking, the colleagues on site will adopt and address issues of sustainability in a more explicit and self-confident manner. In the long term, this will result also in changed curricula. In other words: BBS futur 2.0 pursues a bottom-up approach.
How did you develop the project?
At first, we worked for one and a half years with seven vocational colleges in Lower Saxony and assessed the needs of the teachers. From this we have learned that the individual stakeholders must be connected with each other – both online and face-to-face.
What do such lessons look like specifically?
Let us take the trained retail salesman. Implicitly, this field provides plenty of sustainability topics; explicitly, one can excellently integrate the topic of fair trade, that is, by spreading it across the three years of apprenticeship, for example, in the topic of marketing or in how to plan, control and carry out procurement processes. The individual teacher is challenged to reintroduce the topic again and again; this requires a lot of research. By way of exchange, the individual teacher gains more time and ideas and informally furthers his or her education within the network. This is very effective, for official continuing education programmes are not very popular amongst teachers. I know this from my own experience when I worked as a vocational college teacher.
What do the students bring to the table regarding the topic?
If only I knew. We currently are in the process of finding out how the students react to the topic. I have the impression that on the basis of their personal every day life they are open towards the topic of sustainability, yet that they encounter difficulties with it in their working life. These are the restrictions imposed by the occupation. For instance, retail apprentices work also at petrol stations. How is one to raise the topic of sustainability, if students work there four or five days a week? This is – to phrase it carefully – very challenging. Also, we should not pester the young people to such an extent with this normative central theme so as to push them into a personal crisis. Rather, they have to learn to deal with contradictions and opposition.
Some large enterprises have announced their intention of doing business in a more sustainable way. Do they submit to you corresponding wishes to take this into consideration during the vocational education and training provision?
No, that does not yet happen. Many major companies take sustainability more seriously than only ten years ago. Yet it takes a while until the central themes are broken down to the qualifications of the employees.
What is the response regarding your project?
Carefully restrained. Many of those hearing "network" first think this implies more work. We go to the schools and address the teachers by using an experience they themselves are well familiar with: the best lessons are those I have prepared together with colleagues. One can save time in doing so. This needs explaining at first. But we now have 40 colleges on board, that is good. By the end of 2015, we want to increase this to 100.