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The integration of ESD is a complex problem. It calls for an innovative, student-centred curriculum, as well as professional learning and agency, by which university teachers feel empowered to change their practice and direct their peers and institutions towards ESD. This study aims to explore what university teachers consider to be the most important attitudes in supporting their agency to deliver Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) via a Problem Based Learning (PBL) programme.

This study presents a theoretical framework for professional agency comprising three domains: intrapersonal, action and environmental. A Q methodology is adopted to explore university teachers’ perceptions of the most important environmental factors in supporting their ability to deliver ESD via a problem-based learning (PBL) programme. Twenty-eight participants from six Southeast Asian universities took part in a PBL-based professional development programme designed to improve teachers’ ESD- and PBL-based skills and competencies.

The results indicate that the participants were confident in their ability to implement PBL and saw PBL as an approach suitable for addressing current educational, professional and societal challenges. This study offers a series of recommendations to help university teachers develop their ESD and PBL practices.

Although the literature on human agency is extensive, research surrounding teachers’ professional agency in the context of ESD and PBL in higher education is lacking. The present study addresses this gap by capturing individual teachers’ beliefs, perceptions and views and by using Q methodology to examine the subjectivity of study participants.

This study aims to depict how a change laboratory (CL) promotes sustainable professional practice at the workplace to tackle unequal access to educational success.

The empirical findings are from a CL focusing on school professionals’ agency and a follow-up study one year after the CL.

The study shows how the staff gained insight that professional agency is a collective and relational practice. Furthermore, the staff explored how to make a difference with viable means to create new workplace models for students’ success despite experiencing a conundrum.

This study examined participants’ perspectives in workplace change and provided support for further research examining how professionally and collectively designed models gain sustainability in schools.

This study provides empirical data of how professional agency for change driven by collective visions can be accelerated with the interventionist method CL among school professionals.

This study emphasizes the value of professional collective learning at the workplace, driven by several professional groups in school, and the need to follow up to detect sustainable change.

This study emphasizes the value of professional collective learning at the workplace, driven by several professional groups in school, and the need to follow up to detect sustainable change.

The purpose of this paper is to operationalise and apply a three-level analysis of double stimulation in a Change Laboratory with teachers.

Within qualitative inquiry, this Change Laboratory intervention was conducted as case study, by way of an intensive analysis of an individual unit. The macro-level deals with the societal problem and the collective solution found to tackle it. An intermediate level looks at the Change Laboratory as a methodology able to boost expansive learning through chains of first and second stimuli. The micro-level analyses the participants’ interactions during the sessions and traces the terms connected to the first and second stimulus.

This analysis suggests that the conflicts of motives experienced by the participants at the micro level refer to the aggravated contradiction identified at the macro level. Conflicts of motives seem to be superior in number during the first block of sessions, when the first stimuli are analysed. The micro analysis indicates the 6th session as the turning point of the intervention, when the participants take the auxiliary stimulus and turn it into and effective and meaningful sign. The intermediate level helps to trace the third transition from the formation of the second stimulus to its implementation, reflection upon and further development and generalisation.

Vygotsky’s method of double stimulation is crucial to develop one’s agency and to explain how individuals deliberately influence events. Yet the literature is fragmented and made of brief accounts, and this paper for the first time inspects double stimulation on different levels within a Change Laboratory intervention with teachers.

Many K-12 teaching practices unwittingly reproduce social privileges. To transform their teaching and provide more equitable learning opportunities for students from minoritized communities, teachers need professional learning experiences that are collaborative and “close-to-practice” (Ermeling and Gallimore, 2014). This study aims to propose an approach to open educational resources (OER) to support teacher learning to enact equitable teaching practices.

Based on an integrative review of research on OER, equitable teaching and teacher collaboration, the authors propose the “Open Guidebook Approach” (OGA) to realize and sustain enactment of equitable teaching. OGA materials are practical, available and adaptable for teachers to learn together to transform their practice incrementally and continually within small, job-alike teams. The authors illustrate OGA with Making Meaning (https://edtechbooks.org/making_meaning), which offers information on equitable teaching through graphically illustrated scenarios and guides teachers to plan lessons together, observe each other, debrief and analyze implementation and reflect on and revise lessons based on peer observation and student learning goals.

Teachers using Making Meaning recommend ways to enhance its adaptability and practicality, e.g. by providing repositories of lesson ideas for and by teachers, using classroom videos in addition to illustrated scenarios and emphasizing teacher dispositions underlying equitable teaching practices.

OGA provides a promising way for educators, designers and researchers to work arm-in-arm to transform schooling for teachers and students. Further research is needed to identify structural conditions requisite for OGA use and how OGA materials can optimize teacher collaboration to enact meaningful and effective opportunities for minoritized students to participate and learn in classrooms.