Samarbetsbaserat meningsskapande: Lärarutbildares erfarenheter av att utveckla kompetensbaserade digitala badges

Teacher competences play a crucial role in driving meaningful change during the green transition. However, defining these competences to promote Learning for Sustainability in a tangible and practical manner that benefits teacher education has been a persistent challenge. This case study describes the development process of a competence-based digital open badge constellation for teachers’ sustainability competences within the Erasmus+ Teacher Academies project, “Academy for Sustainable Future Educators – EduSTA”. The article highlights how transnational teams of teacher educators from Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Czechia, and Spain collaboratively analysed abstract competence frameworks and transformed them into clear, actionable descriptions of competence demonstrations. This case study shows that it is possible, through international collaboration, to design concrete and operational competence-based assessment schemes for abstract phenomena like teachers’ sustainability competences. The article carefully describes the negotiation process on the competences that unfolded through cycles of sensemaking, bargaining, defining and refining. The resulting Digital Open Badge Constellation offers tools to develop teachers’ pedagogical competences to support Learning for Sustain­ability in many educational contexts. Secondly, the process description provides valu­able insights for designing similar processes. Process and content expertise as well as templates and milestones are needed to provide regular support and feedback during the process. Finally, frequent meetings and sharing ideas help to see how individual com­petences create the whole. This is crucial for being able to design small and concrete enough competence demonstrations.