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The use of cutting-edge technology in education has the potential to transform the learning experience and greatly contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in emerging economies. With the increased accessibility of technology and online resources, digital literacy has become an essential skill in today's world. Smart e-learning platforms have emerged as a new tool for offering education and training in emerging economies, while also boosting digital literacy.

This chapter will attempt to investigate the impact of new-age technologies on the educational system and how they can help emerging economies achieve the SDGs. This study looks at case studies from various emerging economies, analyzing how innovative technologies like digital learning, smart teaching and learning, mobile learning, online learning, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, and gamification are used to improve education quality and promote SDGs. This chapter emphasizes the impact of technological integration on access to education, reducing inequality, and improving educational quality and relevance. This study also looks into how education may help promote environmental sustainability and economic growth. According to the findings, integrating new-age technologies into the education system can be a game changer in achieving SDGs in emerging nations.

The research is based on the analysis of recent experiences of participative processes in the reuse and maintenance of contexts considered as “urban waste,” focusing on their role in smart sustainable development processes. The recognition of discarded urban spaces/buildings as regeneration opportunities opens up new perspectives on the communities’ commitments and responsibilities, in new governance models. These experiences, better known as “commons,” highlight the active role of communities in establishing new unconventional forms of value creation and production based on circular processes and interdependences between city and communities. Circularization and synergies are the fundamental precondition for smart sustainable development. Assuming the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach as general framework, the phenomenon of commons represents an opportunity to make it operational through an integrated methodology based on the recovery of the environment built according to an inclusive and hybrid approach, configured by culture and shared with local communities. In this perspective, this contribution proposes an evaluation framework not only to monitor the results and impacts produced by these experiences, but also to stimulate and improve awareness, self-learning and self-evaluation processes of the actors involved in regeneration processes toward a smart sustainable development.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many educational institutions to move face-to-face education to entirely online education. This digital transformation has, in turn, reinforced the digital divide between learners who have easy access to digital devices and the Internet and other learners who do not have those. In addition to the digital divide, the differences in their genders and educational levels potentially impact leveling up learning. Therefore, the study in the present chapter has aimed to examine university-level sophomore and junior students’ differences in learning online during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of gender, educational level, and the digital divide. Data from a survey indicate that both females and males, and sophomores and juniors had different attitudes toward using digital devices, attending virtual classes and accessing online courses through the mobile phone or the home Internet. Based on the findings on their differences, the chapter makes some implications and recommendations for policymakers, course designers and teachers in the course design, especially in the emergence.

Gender studies have become an important area of study in recent times. It is being accorded an important place in the curriculum, both at the school and university levels. The many misconceptions that exist regarding the term “gender” need to be addressed, the most common being that gender has solely to do with women and their issues only. The basic important idea that gender studies is inclusive of female, male, and third gender and their issues isn't understood nor made aware to many. The role of education has become all the more important so that we are able to break the prevalent societal stereotypes and address the existing gender inequality. This chapter attempts to present various feminist theories that have contributed to the understanding of gender. The important role of the schools and in particular the textbooks in socializing and building learners' understanding of the sociopolitical contexts cannot be negated. Hence, the chapter will conclude by analyzing how gender content and issues are experienced and get represented in the school curriculum and the textbooks. Many researchers have emphasized the need for gender inclusion to achieve holistic and sustainable development goals. This is important because only with the achievement of social equality can we work toward economic equality.

The research on the positive effects of children’s learning in and with nature is persuasive yet a deeper examination of the contemporary and historical discourses suggests that the school garden has been neither welcoming nor accessible to all children. Its detrimental effects on groups of children have been masked within the discourses of urban children’s health and wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and children’s connection with nature. The school garden has been used historically to enact adult agendas to contain and protect urban children from the social ills of modernity; civilise and assimilate marginalised, impoverished, and immigrant groups; and make future industrial and agricultural labourers who would in turn, entrench the white affluent society’s economic and social positions. In this sense, the school garden was used to reinforce patriarchal, colonial, white supremacist, and eugenic aspirations. We consider the school garden movement in North America through a discourse analysis of historical school garden texts to explore how childhoods were culturally constructed and how these discourses have influenced children both in the past and present.