DEVELOPING COLLABORATIVE SKILLS IN TEACHER EDUCATION THROUGH CHALLENGE BASED LEARNING

Abstract

The ability to collaborate is a crucial prerequisite for successful, sustainable, and meaningful work. Collaborative skills embrace much more than simply working together to achieve a common goal. They involve a person’s ability to build relationships, listen to others, learn from them, and to be inclusive and respectful. Collaborative skills in education are also identified as one of eight key competencies in UNESCO’s definition of education for sustainable development (UNESCO, 2017). To facilitate students’ socialization into the professional expectations, namely, the need to collaborate with peers and with other professional groups, it is important to provide the conditions necessary for developing this critical competency early in education. Challenge based learning (CBL) can be seen both as an approach and method for inclusive students active and sustainable lifelong learning.  CBL embraces diversity and inclusion; emphasizes co-creation and collaboration and engages students as change agents in contextual challenges (Christersson et al., 2022). CBL presented here, has been developed as a project idea within the framework of the higher education teaching of the same name at Malmö University in 2023. The idea is to use CBL as a method, bridging higher education-based courses and practice-based courses, to promote learning and early development of professional collaboration in teacher education at Malmo University. The aim is to give students the opportunity to start developing collaborative professional skills during the first year of their teacher education, addressing one important aspect of sustainable education in a rapidly changing society.