Sustainability is a central educational goal—but how can it actually be integrated into everyday teaching without piling on additional content “on top”?

This professional development session is aimed at teachers and student teachers who want not only to plan sustainability-oriented lessons, but also to recognize, reflect on, and further develop particularly suitable teaching moments. The focus is on how so-called critical teaching moments—such as unexpected student comments, emotional reactions, or controversial questions—can serve as productive opportunities for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).

Using an ESD Safari—an innovative observation and reflection tool in the form of a card game—you will reflect on classroom events specifically from a sustainability perspective. This makes it visible where ESD is already embedded and at which points sustainability-related learning impulses can be developed.

As a player team, you will analyze and reflect on your observations together, develop concrete options for action, and transfer these to future teaching situations. The professional development session combines scientifically grounded insights with practice-oriented methods and offers space for exchange, reflection, and collegial learning.

You will gain:

• a sharpened awareness of sustainability-relevant teaching moments;
• greater confidence in dealing with open, complex ESD topics;
• concrete tools for sustainable, linguistically sensitive lesson design;
• new perspectives on your own teaching as a learning and design space for future-oriented competencies.

This workshop is led by Yulia Edeleva from the Institute of German Studies at TU Braunschweig and was developed as part of a PhD Impact project through the Call for Impact funding of the Transfer Service.