The Team

Our team consists of Marcus Kubsch and Holger Dau from the Department of Physics at FU Berlin, and Johanna Kranz from the Rhineland-Palatinate Competence Center for Climate Change Impacts. Marcus Kubsch is a physics education researcher who aims to empower future teachers to support students in shaping their future sustainably. Holger Dau is an experimental physicist who seeks to advance sustainability topics in research and teaching. Johanna Kranz is a research associate and climate education expert. Through transformative educational approaches, she aims to highlight not only individual but also collective action possibilities, enabling a livable future through positive changes in structures and conditions.

The Project Idea

We live in a time of multiple crises such as wars, biodiversity loss, and climate change. This complexity and uncertainty particularly challenge young people, who must learn to responsibly address these challenges. Many young people are concerned about their future, especially due to the climate crisis, and struggle with dystopian visions of the future. UNESCO emphasizes the need to become "futures literate," meaning the ability to develop and implement constructive future visions.

The FULit project aims to teach students how they can actively contribute to addressing the climate crisis and inspire others to do the same. A course, scheduled for the summer semester of 2024, targets physics education students and students in the Physics Master's program. It will explore success factors for futures literacy and provide the developed teaching materials as Open Educational Resources. The results and concept of the course will be published to be accessible to other programs in the long run.

Through their own commitment and project implementation at FU and in the surrounding area, students will learn and promote sustainable action. This not only strengthens sustainability-oriented engagement but also highlights the potential for local collaboration and enables sustainability transfer by teaching students to empower others in education for a sustainable future.

Our poster at the Teaching Theme Day on November 18, 2024 explains our course in German language.

Conclusion and outlook

The materials for the course “Learning to Shape the Future – Transformative Learning in Physics” are freely available at OSF | Learning to Shape the Future – Transformative Learning in Physics. We offered our course again in the summer semester of 2025, where we revisited some of the elements. The project results will be documented in a future book contribution.

Contact

Prof. Dr. Holger Dau - holger.dau@fu-berlin.de

Jun-Prof. Dr. Marcus Kubsch - m.kubsch@fu-berlin.de

Dr.in Johanna Kranz - johanna.kranz@klimawandel-rlp.d