Co-creating a Young Persons' Guide to a Sustainable Future: Analysis of Learning Steps in a Transdisciplinary Honours Course

The Covid-19 crisis reveals that our expanding human population and globalised economic system create unprecedented risks, such as massive new health threats that impact our social and economic wellbeing. In the current era, called the Anthropocene, human activity disturbs life-supporting planetary processes. Surviving the Anthropocene, therefore, requires 'unlearning' the model that brought us here. This model treats nature as a mere resource for humans to exploit with a view to technological progress and economic growth, and serves unrestrained human population increase. This has disturbed the human–nature balance to such a degree that we now have the potential to eliminate all human life. Current crises make us understand we need a regenerative vision of the future, building on new kinds of knowledge, values, skills, and attitudes. Universities are still grounded in a linear model of research and education, with disciplines studying separate domains of reality without grasping how new, more complex system behaviour emerges from the interaction among those fields. In response to this changing context, the Institute for the Future at KU Leuven runs an Honours Programme Transdisciplinary Insights, offering group learning through real societal challenges and innovative teaching practices. The challenge we present and discuss here tackled the question of how to prepare young people, the leaders of tomorrow, for this complex world (Supplement 1). What are the potential building blocks of an educational trajectory towards a more sustainable future? The challenge was inspired by a theoretical analysis of increasing complexity and its implications for research and education (Snick, 2020). During one academic year (2019–2020) the authors all took part in this challenge, as students and as a coach. In this article we evaluate our learning experiences. The hypothesis underlying our challenge was that co-creating a vision of a possible future, inspired by emerging regenerative social and economic initiatives, allows students to develop new skills and capacities that the traditional educational approach does not offer. Our learning path involved boot camps with a series of workshops, reading scientific books, watching a documen tary, (walking) meetings, field visits, design exercises, co-creative workshops, and group discussions. In this article, we evaluate how these helped us foster our response-ability for co-creating a life-sustaining civilisation. Our findings show that unlearning the old paradigm takes time and that empowering young persons to contribute to a sustainable society requires learning with the head, heart, hands, and hope. These insights can be inspirational to all societal actors who understand that we urgently need to move towards a 'new normal' and that the university has a vital role in this transition.