Transformative Agency for Sustainability: Curriculum Design and Learning Landscape Design with Living Infrastructures

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainability transitions in education require more than adding environmental themes to subject curricula; they demand a curriculum design that is capable of cultivating sustainability competences, democratic participation, and collective problem solving, alongside learning environments that materially and spatially enable these aims. Consistent with Sustainability’s cross-disciplinary focus on sustainable development and educational approaches, this Special Issue will examine how competence-oriented curriculum design and the design of sustainable learning environments co-evolve in educational innovation processes. 

The Special Issue will foreground research on transformative agency and curriculum change, including formative intervention traditions (e.g., Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Change Laboratory approaches) that support teachers and institutions in redesigning objectives, pedagogy, and assessment toward sustainability-related competences, initiative, and participation (Morselli, 2019). Curriculum innovation is treated as a socio-material process unfolding through collective activity, professional learning, and the redesign of practices and infrastructures.

A complementary focus addresses the pedagogy–architecture nexus and learning landscape design, with particular attention to living infrastructures: plant-based, vegetated, and nature-based environments such as school gardens, outdoor classrooms, courtyards, campus ecologies, and multispecies learning settings. We invite contributions that examine how educational spaces can be conceived as interconnected learning landscapes—linking indoor/outdoor environments, public space, community partnerships, and living systems—and how participatory, dialogical co-design processes involving educators, learners, designers, and local stakeholders can improve both sustainability and democratic quality. 

Concepts such as porous educational landscapes may be used to analyse the connectivity between institutions and territories, while the notion of the school as a dwelling supports a view of educational space as lived, relational, and ethically charged (Weyland & Sigillo, 2025). Work on schools in/as public spaces and socio-material “quality in action” strengthens the attention to materiality and governance (Viteritti & Weyland, 2026). We welcome empirical, theoretical, and design-based research that links curriculum design, teacher agency, and learning environment/landscape design, including circular practices (reuse/repair/upcycling) as educational resources.

Topics to be Covered (indicative list)

1. Curriculum design for sustainability competences (constructive alignment: outcomes–pedagogies–assessment).
2. Transformative agency and teacher professional learning for sustainability (CHAT, Change Laboratory, formative interventions).
3. Initiative/entrepreneurship and participation as sustainability-related competences/capabilities.
4. Pedagogy and architecture: Spatial–pedagogical alignment for school/university development.
5. Learning landscape design: Educational ecologies across indoor–outdoor, campus/school grounds, thresholds.
6. Living infrastructures in education: Plants, gardens, vegetated courtyards, outdoor classrooms, campus ecologies.
7. Participatory and dialogical processes: Co-design with teachers, students, communities, municipalities; living labs.
8. Educational institutions as public space: Publicness, inclusion, governance; socio-material quality in action.
9. Circularity and making: Reuse/repair/upcycling as democratic learning infrastructures.
10. Methods and indicators to evaluate sustainable learning environments (learning, wellbeing, inclusion, agency, partnerships).

Types of Manuscripts Encouraged

Original research (qual/quant/mixed); design-based research; participatory action research; comparative case studies; systematic/scoping reviews; conceptual/theoretical and methodological papers.

References

1. Morselli, D. (2019). The Change Laboratory for Teacher Training in Entrepreneurship Education: A New Skills Agenda for Europe. Springer.
2. Weyland, B., & Sigillo, B. (2025). Dwelling Schools. Between pedagogy and Architecture. Peter Lang.
3. Viteritti, A., & Weyland, B. (2026). School in/as Public Space. Constructing Quality in Action. In Fassari, L. G., & Low, M. (Eds.), The Social Quality of Public Space. Integration, Strategy, Subjectivation. Routledge.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Daniele Morselli
Prof. Dr. Beate Weyland
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• curriculum design
• sustainability competences
• transformative agency
• Change Laboratory
• teacher professional learning
• sustainable learning environments
• pedagogy and architecture
• learning landscape design
• living infrastructures
• plant-based learning
• nature-based learning
• outdoor learning
• participatory design
• co-design
• school as public space
• circular education
• upcycling