## Editorial Introduction

## Conference Issue: Aarhus, Denmark

BY  J E S P E R   G A R S D A L   &   S I M O N   N Ø R G A A R D   I V E R S E N

Welcome to the new International journal Futures of Education, Culture, and Nature -Learning to Become -in short FECUN . As this is the journal's inaugural issue, a few words on context, background, and format of the journal seem to be appropriate before presenting the content of this particular conference issue.

The journal is a part of the so-called FECUN-project, which besides the journal, also hosts an international conference series (and in the future also various other activities and projects). The project was developed during autumn 2021 and was launched in early 2022. The project will reflect the many contemporary currents, streams, and challenges humanity faces in the 21 st century regarding sustainability, sustainable development, and the Anthropocene.

The FECUN-project is concerned with how education can influence 'head, heart and hands' through various disciplines and vocations and the dynamics between education, culture, and nature in different futures (and pasts). The project has two aims. First, to explore how education can reflect and contribute to both new and old understandings of what it means (and takes) to become human together with other humans and non-humans in ways that secure future generations for both humankind and non-humankind. Secondly, FECUN is concerned with how various disciplines in Higher Education, including TVET and polytechnic Higher Education, might be transformed fruitfully accordingly. For more information on both the journal and the FECUN-project, see the journal website and the FECUN project website.

FECUN is inspired and motivated by two global UNESCO initiatives on education, 'ESD for 2030' and especially 'Futures of Education,' so a few words on these two initiatives. The first initiative is related to UNESCO's work on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) which UNESCO has been involved in for many years. 'ESD for 2030' follows the Decade for ESD (DESD) initiative 2005-2014, and the Global Action Programme (GAP) 2015-2019 and concerns (a bit crudely put) the relation between education and the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 and the implications this has for the transformation of education. This initiative has resulted in a framework and a roadmap for UNESCO's work with ESD towards 2030. The second initiative, Futures of Education, aims to rethink and shape the futures (in the plural) of education post-2050 on a global scale. In November 2021, the report ' Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education' was published. This report builds on consultation with more than a million people from all over the planet. It argues for seeing education as a public good,  a continuing 'commoning' of a new 'global infrastructure of education' and points also more specifically to the role of Higher Educational and Research Institutions regarding contributing to the 'world's collective knowledge commons on vital aspects of our collective world' building. It is an essential aspect of the activities initiated by FECUN, that they can be related to this continuous process and development of the global infrastructure and 'be-commoning' of education undertaken by UNESCO.

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The FECUN journal publishes two types of journal issues. Firstly, it will publish conference issues that contain conference presentations transformed into articles or papers from conferences in the FECUN conference series. Before publication, these articles and papers have gone through a post-conference editorial review process. Secondly, in between conference issues, the journal also publishes thematic issues on a theme relevant to the FECUN perspective. All contributions to these thematic issues will be subject to double-blind review process. The cur-

The texts presented here started their journey towards publication as presentations at the Futures-21 conference on April 22-23, 2021. The conference was initially planned as a hybrid onsite/online conference in Aarhus, Denmark, organized by VIA University College, but was due to the COVID-19 situation transformed into an online-only conference, and ended up being a three-track online conference with 250 registered participants from 25 countries from all over the world. The overall theme was 'Education for and as Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene.' The conference had further three subthemes, 'The Anthropocene, visions for the future(s) and the development of the intergenerational contract,' 'Sustainable development, equality, diversity, and ESD,' and 'Sustainable Development, edification, and ESD of

The texts can be seen as various forms of response to the challenges embedded in the theme, the subthemes of the conference, and the two UNESCO initiatives. There are 27 contributions in this issue, 15 longer pieces (articles) and 12 shorter pieces (selected papers). The presenters came from very different backgrounds and disciplines. They included researchers and educators from universities, academies, vocational Higher Educational Institutions, independent researchers, students, and people from civil society. There is obviously, therefore, a corresponding variety of responses to these challenges. This polyphony in perspectives and backgrounds can be both contrastive and complementary but likewise highlights that the challenges ahead can manifest themselves in equally varied ways and consequently demands multiform responses. Complex problems require complex solutions. Nevertheless, it is also clear that it is possible to find several themes that overlap in a web of family resemblances in those

rent issue is the first conference issue in the journal. poly-technical Education.' contributions.

Besides Education for Sustainable Development, these themes also cast a new light on educational endeavors, which deepens and complements the understanding of ESD and highlights relations between education, culture, and nature. Just to mention a few: the changing perspectives on history and education in the Anthropocene -and the post-Anthropocene, the challenge of nationalism and the futures of education, aesthetics and innovation, especially concerning arts, design, and architecture concerning ESD and the Anthropocene, the role and impact of international organizations as UNESCO, but also OECD on global educational discourse, challenges of intercultural pedagogics and meetings across pedagogical institutions, new forms of local and international partnerships inside and outside formal education, the interaction between education and community, student involvement, and citizenship education, humanity's interaction with non-human entities, the valuable but also problematic, complex and challenging role of various forms of technology in the futures of education, culture and nature, values, norms and the role of discipline in education, edificational ideas, values and ideals and their relation to culture and nature, the role of emotions of sensibility in education, pedagogy and didactics at various levels and in different forms of education, as well, as the role HEI institutions can and ought to play in educational reform. The presentation of the individual contributions below is therefore not exhaustive but should rather be seen as an appetizer to dive into these contributions

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The idea of futures brings associations to something new, which is about to happen, emerge, be created, or innovate. However, how is this to be understood when we talk about the futures of education, culture, and nature? Daniel Ross opens this first issue of the journal by reflecting on the question he raised in his keynote at the Futures-21 conference, which immediately links the notions of sustainable development, the Anthropocene, and education. How can we even begin to conceive or imagine education after 2050 without first recognizing that the current dismal failure to approach these targets stems in no small part from an inability to foster collective knowledge and will necessary to take care of this biospheric emergency? Ross argues detailed that the remedy for this inability depends on transforming the conditions of intergenerational transmission. He argues that attentiveness has to be (re-)created in education. He discusses how this can be done at the individual and structural-institutional level, and raises, at the same time, by using central distinctions made by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, a strong critique of educational institutions for forgetting their purpose

Ljupco Kocarev & Jasna Koteska introduces two other critical themes when reflecting on the  future  of  education  concerning  culture,  especially  the  role  of  technology,  non-human agency, and the relation between humans and non-humans. We will later see that other contributions relate to the human and non-human world regarding nature. However, Kocarev and Koteska, in their discussion on how humanity must learn to connect to digital agents in a hybrid world, raise profound questions of an ethical nature by introducing the notion of a digital nonhuman agent called 'digital me'. They do that by discussing seven ontological qualities of such a 'digital me': a) double -layer status of Digital Being versus digital me, b) digital me versus real me, c) mind-digital me and body-digital me, d) digital me versus doppelganger (shadow digital me), e) non-human time concept, f) social quality, g) practical immortality. Kocarev and Koteska thereby point to some of the challenges and dilemmas humanity might encounter in the decades to come concerning digitalization; challenges which also has to be reflected in the future educational systems.

The following article, 'International Collaboration for a Sustainable Future Faculty and Student Reflections from a Virtual Polytechnic Classroom,' also relates to technology, but here as a tool, which further collaboration and new forms of partnership across educational institutions in different countries. The article presents a collaboration between faculty and students on Map the System, a global competition arranged by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Oxford University's Map the System on social and environmental change. The article presents how students and faculty from various fields of study and three higher polytechnic educational institutions in Canada, New Zealand, and Denmark participated in the competition as a joint international team.

In their contribution, Natalie Mossin, Pelle Munch-Petersen, and Mikkel A. Thomassen take as a point of departure the fact that current practice in the building industry is not sustainable. To  create  sustainable  practices,  we  need  to  understand  why  new  architectural  solutions, products, and services struggle to become market dominant. They discuss findings from seven case studies to argue that dynamic capabilities are required for sustainable innovation to succeed. Rather than simply following established practices, navigating in emergent sustainable markets requires finding and forming new practices, which makes the ability to work freely among knowledge domains an essential capability in future professionals. That points to an educational potential in working with open-ended project-and problem-specific assignments to build the capabilities needed to reach sustainable change.

Design, like architecture, has the potential for transformation and innovation. However, as Laura Clèries discuss, today's design discipline faces multiple new challenges and is changing. As a result, the purpose of the design and the role of designers is being redefined. Which designerly ways of innovating, or 'Design Attitudes,' should be promoted in the future? This paper presents four such design attitudes: The Conscious, the Engaged, the Resilient, and the Rebel, and how these relate to sustainability, technology, innovation, industry, and wellness. These attitudes, or Designers' Identities, can, packed as a trend report and as a digital survey tool, offer a means to explore the training of future design professionals and the positioning of the design practice.

The notion of citizenship is essential concerning social justice issues and ESD. However, the idea of citizenship is complex regarding what it means to be a good citizen? And also, the extension of citizenship varies; is citizenship, for example, presented primarily as related to a particular (nation) state, or is it as, for instance, as UNESCO suggests, prudent to connect the ESD with the idea of global citizenship?

Kerstin von Brömssen, Tommaso Milani, Andrea Spehar, and Simon Bauer point out that civic orientation courses transmit knowledge, norms, and values, further "integration" into the new country. They present a case study of one specific module, entitled "nature and environment," in civic orientation courses for newly arrived adults in Sweden. The analyses show how Sweden and its citizens' real "success story" is constructed through an overall discourse of Swedes' high awareness of the environment and nature through comparisons between geographical spaces in the world. It is suggested that there is an urgent need to reflect critically on the aim, content, and teaching practices of civic orientation courses for newly arrived migrants, as these seem to contribute to the Swedish nation's reproduction of "banal nationalism."

Karen Bjerg, in her contribution, discusses possibilities and limitations of (global citizenship) education in versions of skills-and-competency-based versus virtue/value-based approaches as means of solving current global issues and concerns, including (unknown) futures of education at a local and international level. She compares OECD and UNESCO's different approaches to education. Bjerg argues that the OECD view of education can be seen as related to skillsand-competency-based approaches, while UNESCO's view is related to virtue/value-based approaches. OECD has influenced global education policy through the so-called PISA tests, which has led to changes in education systems. However, taking Denmark as an example, where OECD-inspired educational reforms have not succeeded, Bjerg argues that virtue-value-based approaches might begin to gain more momentum than it has in the last decades.

The following four articles relate to future higher polytechnic education in various ways. Thomas Østergaard, Torsten Sack-Nielsen, Birgitte Woge Nielsen, Birgitte Helbæk Marcussen, and Karen Frederiksen describes a transdisciplinary ESD competencies course for educators at VIA  University  College, Denmark. The course "Circular Economic and Sustainable Development in the Education" (CESDE) involved more than 100 educators from a wide variety of faculties. The presentation analyses three levels of impact of the competencies course; (1) impacts on the individual educators approach to teaching practices; (2) impacts on the values in managerial and organizational levels; (3) impacts on the personal and institutional interaction with surrounding communities, business, and society. It also analyzes to what extent the effects of transformative changes towards a sustainable university have been realized and how these experiences with "learning the learners to become" can be implemented at other Higher Educations. (HE's).

Ainoa Abella Garcia, Thomas Østergaard, María José Araya León present in their contribution two new discourses in both entrepreneurial and design didactic research and how they could be connected. The first is "emotional learning" and "emotional design" -regarding how emotions impact the student's learning process' in Educations for Sustainable Development (ESD). Emotions affect the student's learning process, health, and well-being (Pekrun, 2014, p. 28). The other discourse concerns how using value-driven emotional entrepreneurial didactics, based on the connection between emotionally influencing actions/events and the development of entrepreneurial competencies, can present a new emotionally based understanding of the value of altruistic (sustainable) outcomes within entrepreneurial education (Lackeus, 2020). Further, the article presents two emotional tools: "Design for Change -Yggdrasill" from VIA Design, Denmark, and "Emotional Analogous Data" from ELISAVA, Barcelona.

Niels Larsen discusses how Teacher Training Institutions (TTI) address sustainable development and learning globally. First, a partnership program is presented between a TTI in Denmark and a TTI in Kenya, which integrated different educational approaches from the two partners. That functions as a starting point for a broader discussion on how TTIs can develop partnerships as a basis for co-learning that integrates ESD elements and establishes learning communities across different nationalities in the future. Finally, Larsen reflects on the importance of awareness of the so-called three-layered cultural challenge when establishing international partnerships in education.

Elinor Bray-Collins, Nalini Andrade, and Catherine Wanjiru present the findings of an extensive review of the literature on gender issues in Africa's TVET sector. Specifically, they highlight several themes which emerge from this review and propose a theoretical framework for understanding TVET institutions as gendered spaces. The TVET sector is frequently discussed because of its potential for the advancement of the SDGs on the African continent and the achievement of Agenda 2063; indeed, it is seen as crucial to achieving these goals. What the literature suggests, however, is that in the absence of gender-responsive reforms rooted in an understanding of how "gender regimes" operate and persist, TVET institutions may tend to be sites of reproduction of patriarchal dynamics as opposed to sites of their transformation.

The attempt to reflect on the futures of education, culture, and nature raises several complex issues. Felix Riede shows that is this is very much the case for the much-debated notion of the Anthropocene. First, the Anthropocene informs us that the fates of climate, the natural world, and humankind and its many cultures are conjoined. Secondly, human history is not an inevitable history of progress but a potential catastrophe. These realizations are driven by the perspectives  of  future  climate  change  and  the  likelihood  of  dramatically  negative  consequences for life on Earth. Looking back into deep history, however, the same realizations also affect how we view the human past and what driving forces we view as causal. In turn, Riede claims, this impinges significantly on how we teach deep and recent history, articulate it with other disciplines, and display it in children's books, school textbooks, teaching materials, and museums. Finally, Riede draws on notions of dark pedagogy and disciplinary shadow places to highlight how Anthropocene deep history can connect knowledge domains from the natural and social sciences.

Lene Andersen discusses another perspective on an increasingly complex world, where local decisions have a global impact, namely the perspective of a revitalized and contemporary notion of Bildung ('Edification'). Andersen defines Bildung as the combination of knowledge about the world and the emotional and moral to engage and take responsibility. She introduces a new heuristic model, the Bildung Rose, that depicts society as consisting of seven domains: Production, Technology, Aesthetics, Power, Science, Narrative, and Ethics. To thrive in one's society, be an active and engaged citizen, and see society from a system's perspective, one needs to understand some of all seven domains. Deep knowledge in one domain is professionally crucial, but the complexity of the world and most jobs demands that individuals contextualize decision-making into a broader societal context. This article presents the Bildung Rose, explores the model's universality, and suggests how it can be practically applied both at the macro level when designing educational systems and organizations, at the mesolevel when developing programs, and at the micro-level when educating or making decisions.

David Kergel presents a perhaps surprising relation between digital teaching and learning and diversity-sensitive teaching. He first notices the difference between 'diversity management,' which essentially addresses the harnessing of diversity in corporate and market logic, and a power-critical understanding of diversity that problematizes exclusion dynamics, hierarchies, and dependency relations based on culture ethnic, and similar constructions of difference. He then presents the overlooked common origin of early Internet culture and an emancipatory  diversity-sensitive  stance,  which  is  situated  in  the  (US)  universities'  emancipation movements from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Finally, Kergel presents a competence model for a diversity-sensitive use of digital media in educational contexts based on this genealogical reconstruction.

Michael Paulsen explores the complex issue regarding how educational theory and practice might change if we shift from our inherited Holocene scenic and human-centered world understanding to an emerging Anthropocene dialogical and life-centered world understanding. More specifically, he argues that the onto-sympathy model proposed by Jane Bennett based on a life-centered world understanding is helpful towards fostering ecological awareness in education. However, according to Paulsen, Bennet's model needs to be complemented by an idealistic ethico-sympathy model, which pays more attention to cautious action, focusing on the possibility and value of zoëlogical interaction between humans and more-than-humans. Paulsen claims that if both models are used, it becomes more likely that we will begin to gain educational experiences with developing ethical relationships with more-than-humans. Further, Paulsen argues that we will become able to co-create interspecies life communities on a larger scale than today -both of which are needed more than ever in planetary history.

A group of papers related to design and project-based learning (PBL) describes different sustainability projects. Some integrate dimensions of interaction with the non-human and material world in various ways. For example, Caroline McCaw presents a way of working with students  and  social  and  environmental  community  groups  outside  of  Campus  on  projects which consider the needs of places and beings that are non or more-than-human (paraphrasing David Abram). She presents two such projects. The first project, Ō wheo Rising, involved design students working with a local stream. Using various social, cultural, and environmental histories and perspectives, students learned to see, hear and understand the stream as a living system with mauri (life force). The second project, the Kākā project, was developed by design students collaborating with an Information technology student. This project focused on developing design solutions that would help educate local communities about behaviour and best practice regarding Oroko nui Ecosanctuary's flock of native parrots, known as kākā.

In their contribution, Megan Brasell-Jones and Caroline McCaw discuss how waste management  can  become  connected  with  collaboration  and  shared  thinking  and  practices, thereby becoming a learning experience. The focus is on developing kaitiakitanga (an indigenous M ā ori concept that translates to guardianship) to care for and protect environments for the benefit of all people and the planet. More specifically, they discuss a recent project Wormporium , an organic campus-wide composting system. They describe how a design student developed the name as a part of her work with the graphic profile for the project. The term refers to a new onsite organic waste system at Otago Polytechnic producing organic compost. It is intended to signal that organic waste should be seen as an opportunity, not a problem.

Anne Louise Bang presents sustainability in fashion and textile design as a wicked problem due to the complexity of the value chains in the textile industry. How can educators and students then be prepared to critically work with, contribute to and reflect upon sustainable development, acting as change agents across disciplines? Bang suggests that part of the answer is to combine disciplinary expertise with cross-disciplinary teamwork. This point should be fully acknowledged and implemented in the teaching and curriculums of fashion and textile designers. She argues, by examples and by referring to the Danish weaver Astrid Skibsted's "Yarn Winding Manifesto" and insights of the Bauhaus artist and viewer Anni Albers, that yarn winding can exemplify a way to think and act, which provides the ground for the use of frameworks and method collections in cross-disciplinary project teams.

Sara Denise Narciso notes that PBL has many advantages when applied to communication design projects. Students' learning processes and community groups involved in the projects benefit from PBL. The former by engaging in real-life problems; the latter by understanding their own needs and working with a designer through PBL. However, Narciso argues that there is a lack of coherent resources and consistency of delivery in PBL-education courses. Therefore, explorative studies, including a literature review and a range of stakeholders' interviews, investigated the needs and opportunities of the PBL model were conducted. That study led to a proposed systematization of best practices in delivering PBL in the classroom. Further, Narciso outlines various improvements and recommendations in PBL to provide a sustainable, ethical and high-value chain that can benefit the communities and stakeholders.

Inge Andrew describes her work with a group of people that don't generally have a voice in everyday discourse -perpetrators of domestic violence. Stopping Violence Dunedin (SVD) is run by experienced facilitators who, instead of blaming their clients, empower them with a sense of community and positive self-worth. Andrew's project focused on creating a value object to enhance their journey of change towards a non-violent life. The value creation process involved using communication design to develop a social inquiry, working to understand this community and the challenges they face. The project also aligned with Sustainable Development Goals (SVD), specifically Reduced Inequalities, where the education and support for perpetrators of domestic violence ensure that women are kept safer. Design activist methodologies turned out to be a valuable benchmark to provide a space for questioning assumptions around a community we often disregard, in this case, perpetrators of domestic violence.

Torben Albertsen brings us back to how we relate to non-human entities and further questions how intercultural learning can occur across worldviews. In Chile, at least ideally, intercultural education is concerned with learning from indigenous people. As such, anthropology is at the center stage. Albertsen argues that one of the aspects where theories of learning might find inspiration from anthropology has to do with plurality, specifically how to embrace plurality without reducing it. If sustainability has any stake in this, it would have to do with continually  learning  how  to  sustain  plurality.  He  presents  the  anthropologist  Viveiros  de Castro's proposal for Amerindian cosmology, the notion of 'multi-naturalism,' and De Castro's methodology, which proposes a way to sustain plurality. Albertsen reflects on the implications of this perspective concerning intercultural learning. He suggests that in (radical) intercultural learning  processes,  we  are  never  actually  talking  about  the  same  things  or  realities,  even though our translations may indicate that they are similar. In this sense, comparison is paramount, but only through the optics of translation. Therefore, comparison must be re-thought into the service of translation, rather than translation being in the service of comparison.

Machiko Niimi and Mary Butler present a case study of a project which connects closely with the general commitment underpinning the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which is to leave no one behind. More specifically, the project links directly to SDG3: Good Health and Wellbeing, which again links to WHO's Global Action Plan on Universal Eye Health. Students developed the project, the project goal being to create a child-to-child vision screening toolkit to integrate eye health into the school curriculum and make vision testing more accessible for children. Researchers and practitioners from three involved institutions formed an interdisciplinary research team to support the students. The group continued to work together to ensure the ongoing sustainability of the project. Niimi and Butler argue that this case study exemplifies how problem-based learning can provide a context for students to do real work that makes a difference in the world.

Bridie Lonie brings us back to the question of aesthetics, now not primarily related to design but through a reflection on how art can help us understand the Anthropocene. The case she is examining is an art exhibition, "The Complete Entanglement of Everything', inspired by Donna Haraway's notion of 'entanglement' and aimed at demonstrating the emergence of an understanding of the Anthropocene as it is playing out in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, New Zealand. Lonie argues with art historian Gregory Minissale that art can enable conceptual understanding so that each viewer experiences it and that curatorial projects in themselves can operate as conceptual art. Further, she argues that the argument that culture is the fourth pillar of sustainability is strengthened when artworks are viewed as holding patterns, containers, or vehicles, for emergent and complex scenarios.

Lesley Brook also reflects on the exhibition, "The Complete Entanglement of Everything.' Her study can be seen as complementing Loonies theoretical perspectives, by presenting an empirical oriented evaluation of the emotional impact that the exhibition had on visitors.  Each participant sorted photographs of the artworks according to the strength of their positive/negative emotional responses to the artworks. This was followed by a semi-structured interview. This paper presents the results of the analysis of the transcripts of answers by 24 participants to three of the questions asked in the interview. Participants were asked to describe how they feel about the effects of human activity on our world, to identify which artwork or artworks most closely represented how they felt about that, and whether they thought or felt differently about the effects of human activity on our world after experiencing this exhibition. Their answers suggest that a values-driven approach is suitable for improving human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation and suggest in line with Lonie's conclusions, that environmental art has a valuable role to play, to maintain awareness about climate action and encouraging public support for environmental initiatives.

Both the notion of the Anthropocene and the notion of sustainable development, as this is also embedded in the SDG's raise various questions regarding the relation between local and global perspectives for example issues of global justice concerning the distribution of wealth and the distribution of environmental impact worldwide. However, there are also several issues partly following from this, which impacts how we can perceive the role of education, for example  regarding  (as  already  mentioned)  the  dynamic  and  tensions  between  global  and more local-oriented dimensions of education and notions of citizenship (i.e. national citizenship), challenges when reflecting on the link between development and liberation, and finally how we can perceive local educational paradigms in a way, which on the one hand is not

'closed', but at the other hand neither is destroyed by a one size fits all global educational policy. The three last contributions address in various ways some of these concerns.

We have already touched upon the connection between ESD and notions of global citizenship. This connection is also prevalent through Michael Vogt's and Marianne Leth's reflections on ESD, regarding how to connect locally with the global perspectives in education, and challenges that also exist concerning doing this. Their case is an interdisciplinary course, 'Local explorations - global awareness' at the Teacher Education in Aarhus, Denmark - a collaboration between the school subjects 'nature & technology and 'history' focusing on sustainability. As indicated by the course title, Vogt and Leth have some educational ideals for the course, which is related to an extended notion of the concept of Bildung , and the Scandinavian tradition for 'Outdoor pedagogics.'  They present various forms of activities in the course, which is inspired by this pedagogy; they also raise the important theme of the relation between subject didactics and interdisciplinary pedagogics inside existing educational institutions.

Jesper Marius Als, in his contribution, discusses the educational institutions' role regarding the futures of education, especially Higher Polytechnic Institutions. He takes his starting point from the link between the idea of development and education as a liberating and emancipatory activity.  After  briefly presenting  and  reflecting  on  some of his  own  experiences while working for UNESCO in South-East Asia, he discusses two well-known ways of connecting development with education as liberating and emancipating, namely Amartya Sens's Capability Approach and Paulo Freire's pedagogics of the oppressed. Als also discusses some of the criticisms of the notion of development, as well as the notion of commons related to education. He ends by arguing global educational systems over the next 30 years needs to address the issue of their own sustainability, understood as the following two pillars, 1) their ability to enable people to navigate both locally and globally, and 2) their ability to draw significantly more attention on the formative aspects of education at all levels of the system.

Tsewang Lhundup closes this first issue of the FECUN journal. He also touches upon the relation between global and the local dimensions, taking his departure from the notion of all connectedness of all things. Lhundup points to two different ways of understanding this concept. Firstly he mentions that one can understand this idea in the context of the fourth industrial revolution as promoted by, among others, Klaus Schwab (the chairman of WorldEconomici Forum). However, Lhundup argues that such a notion of interdependence is not enough for future education. It has to be supplemented by an educational system that aims to develop keen and caring insight into the interdependence of all things to release human beings from suffering. Lhundup argues that this complementary understanding of interdependence in Buddhism is the notion of Pratitya-samutpada .  He argues that this idea is what the Bhutanese Buddhist Monastery Educational system seeks. Lhundup mentions that the interaction between these two ideas of interdependence must be connected without being reduced to being identical. He explains the Bhutanese concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a step in  this  direction  and in  continuation of this introduces a new concept, namely Gross Local Happiness (GLH).

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To sum up, if you are interested in the futures of education, culture, and nature, you will find plenty of inspiration in the many texts published in this conference issue. We wish you happy reading!