Carving space for sustainable futures through vocational education and training: Why and how organisational choices and teaching practices matter

Diana Holmqvist

doi:10.3384/njvet.2242-458X.25155164

Authors

Diana Holmqvist Linköping University, Sweden https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9848-5098

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/njvet.2242-458X.25155164

Keywords:

education for sustainability, conventions of worth, place-anchored pedagogy, embodied learning, radical imagination, liveable futures

Abstract

In this keynote from the 2025 NordYrk conference, I seek to reframe vocational education and training (VET) from employability towards liveability and offer a non-metric repertoire for legitimising civic and ecological purposes in practice. I do this by showing how VET is still largely organised around productivist logics, which leaves little room for non-economic purposes such as community well-being or care for the living world. Because of this, I suggest we reconsider what we value in VET. To widen what counts, I introduce three conventions of worth that could inform post-growth VET – civic (community and care), ecocentric (ecological embeddedness and sufficiency), and dialectical (critique, plurality, reflective judgement). Rather than metricisation, conventions of worth such as these rely on critical reflection and public justification to assess quality. In the next part I turn to teaching and propose carving space as pedagogy. I argue that three dimensions – time, place, and relationships – are particularly vital when teaching for sustainability and discuss some of the advantages that VET has over other education contexts. Lastly, I turn to the practical implications for academic work, arguing that the choices we make in research and teaching also play a role in shaping sustainable futures.

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