Creative Sustainability Education in the Age of AI: Learning, Governance and Environmental Footprints
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Education and Approaches".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 7 January 2027 | Viewed by 338
Special Issue Editor
Interests: design, technology and engineering education; education for sustainable development; creativity and innovative learning; educational technology and artificial intelligence; knowledge and innovation management; cognitive science
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Creative Sustainability Education (CSE) integrates sustainability learning with creative practice—design, interdisciplinary inquiry, prototyping, modeling, and futures thinking—to build learners’ agency to act on complex socio-ecological challenges. Generative AI (GenAI) can enhance CSE by accelerating ideation, supporting simulation and scenario design, enabling rapid prototyping and decision-making, and strengthening interdisciplinary inquiry towards green pedagogy. At the same time, GenAI raises urgent concerns about bias and uncertainty, academic integrity and authenticity, privacy and data protection, inequitable access, procurement and accountability, and the environmental impacts of AI systems.
This Special Issue invites empirical, design-based, and policy-analytic scholarship that examines how GenAI can responsibly strengthen creative sustainability learning while improving governance and reducing environmental impacts. We especially welcome submissions that connect at least two of three pillars—learning design, governance, and environmental footprints—and that provide transparent methods, evaluative evidence, and actionable implications. Contributions may include cross-country comparisons, scalable institutional models, and robust case studies across K–12, higher education, teacher education and informal learning, as well as systematic reviews and meta-syntheses on CSE and GenAI.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to)
- GenAI-enabled Creative Sustainability Education (CSE/ESD) learning designs and evidence of learning outcomes
- Green pedagogy and carbon-/resource-aware teaching with GenAI
- Assessment and feedback models for creativity + sustainability competencies, including GenAI disclosure and authenticity/integrity safeguards
- Learner agency, systems thinking, and collective action: how GenAI reshapes participation and decision-making on socio-ecological challenges
- Governance models for GenAI in education
- Privacy, data protection, and safeguarding in educational GenAI use
- Equity, inclusion, and climate justice in GenAI-supported sustainability education
- Footprint measurement and reporting in education
- Procurement and implementation strategies that reduce impacts
- Responsible AI innovation
Prof. Dr. Stanislav Avsec
Guest Editor
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.
Keywords
- creative sustainability education
- generative AI
- AI literacy
- green pedagogy
- governance
- environmental footprint
- carbon-aware computing
- climate justice
- responsible AI innovation
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