Teacher Academies Project

From June 3–5, 2025, the Erasmus+ TAP-TS (Teacher Academy Project – Teaching Sustainability) came to a close with a final project meeting and a teacher educator multiplier event in Dresden. Hosted by TU Dresden, the events brought together 15 project team members representing 11 partner institutions from 7 European countries, along with 15 invited experts in sustainability-focused teacher education from across Europe.

Over the three days, participants reflected on the outcomes of the project and explored ways to sustain its impact. A key highlight was the presentation of the final evaluation report, conducted by K&R Education (Sweden). The evaluation confirmed that TAP-TS made a significant and lasting impact on educators, students, and institutions. Teachers reported transformative changes to their classroom practices, including more interdisciplinary and outdoor learning, increased collaboration, and the integration of the GreenComp framework. Students became more engaged and took greater responsibility for sustainability in their schools. School leaders initiated whole-school strategies, and teacher educators integrated project materials into both pre-service and in-service training.

During the multiplier event, participants explored all seven Learning and Teaching Packages (LTPs) through interactive sessions. These interdisciplinary resources—praised for their clarity, adaptability, and relevance—will continue to be used in teacher education and schools. The accompanying LTP Compendium offers pedagogical guidance for their implementation.

The meeting concluded with the 20-year celebration of the TU Dresden ZLSB, a fitting backdrop for a project dedicated to educational transformation.

Importantly, TAP-TS does not end here. Many partners expressed strong intentions to continue working together, extend the network, and build on the project’s results through new collaborations, adaptations of materials, and integration into national contexts. The project leaves a lasting foundation for embedding sustainability in education across Europe.

It was a pleasure to be with Elena, Bento and Neusa, at the Association of Teacher Educators Europe and World Association of Teacher Educations conference “Teacher Education in a Globalised World” in Tarragona last week, where we presented a symposium dedicated to TAP-TS.

The conference was an opportunity to connect with teacher educators from around the world on current issues in teacher education. There were many inspiring approaches to the conference key themes of: sustainability, digitalisation and inclusion. For example, Sarah Prestidge shared inspiring examples of online learning and teaching formats from Australia, including virtual reality learning spaces, and Low Ee Ling described measures to enhance the resilience of teachers in Singapore through a focus on values; local, national and international community, and professionalism.

The four papers we presented in the TAP-TS symposium touched on all the conference key themes. I began with a paper with an overview of TAP-TS, and how our transdisciplinary approach has supported teacher learning for sustainable futures. Elena presented on LTP 2, digitality and sustainability and showed with examples the multifaceted connections between these two themes. I presented the third paper, exploring participants’ reception of LTP 1 unit 4 “multilingual education for sustainability” – which was good timing, as an article of this study has just been published. Finally, Bento and Neusa gave valuable insights from the LTP on environmental education and sustainability, including the voices of school children from Santarem.

As we near the end of our project, it was a lovely chance to collaborate once more with colleagues and connect our work to the bigger picture of teacher education in a rapidly changing world.