The term "sustainability" encounters people in diverse contexts with diverse meanings. With the growing vagueness of the concept of sustainability, however, awareness of the concrete sustainability challenges facing our world is also becoming blurred. Even pupils for whom the topic is laid down in outline plans hardly know what to do with it. In particular, fundamental economic and technological questions are affected, which is shown by initial studies from the subproject "Public Awareness".

Result: In contrast to fuzzy sustainability rhetoric, concrete questions of the approach do not reach people sufficiently. However, it is the participation of the majority on which the success of sustainable global development depends.

In the subproject "Public Awareness" the scientists investigate the teaching and learning behaviour of people in terms of sustainability. On the basis of the results, the team develops and tests target group-oriented teaching materials on the subject of sustainable production aiming to make the well-engineered materials available free of charge on a teaching and learning platform.

The researchers place a special focus on the teaching method of "learning by dismantling" to illustrate the manifold connections between technology, resource consumption and global production in value creation networks. In this way, for example, dismantling a mobile phone in combination with games to determine the raw materials helps schoolchildren to understand which materials are required for modern everyday products - and thus opens up their understanding of the challenges of sustainable production. First test runs have shown that the topic holds a great fascination, especially for young people. The project would like to use and promote this interest.

Services for schools

In the area of Public Awareness, it is our declared goal to use scientifically gained knowledge to find promising new ways to convey the complexity of sustainability, especially in relation to industrial production. Thus, the understanding of the special learning efficiency with increased practical relevance regularly results in new didactic approaches for children and young people, which have already been realised in the form of youth projects with teaching materials, most of which have been developed specifically for this purpose, and which are constantly further developed in the course of their evaluation. Within the framework of the voluntary cooperation with schools and/or teachers, we develop projects that are specifically tailored to the age group and educational level.
Announcements and documentation of these youth projects as well as contact information can be found on our regularly updated blog Education for Tomorrow. In the download area you will find the possibility to download some of the newly developed teaching materials for free use.

Youth projects:
- Girls' Day 2012: Experimenting with light and the sun
- Long Night of the Sciences 2012
- Student film sustainable production: PMF Group 2012/2013
- Youth research 2013
- Girls' Day 2013: Gold in mobile phones - modern treasures
- Green Day 2013: Experience sustainability in research
- Youth research 2014
- Girls' Day 2014
- School cooperation with Wilma-Rudolph-Oberschule 2015
- Youth research 2015
- Girls' Day 2015

Download: Presentation of youth work at the SFB 1026

 Public Relations:
- Electronics Goes Green 2012
- Berlin Summer University 2012

Learn more about the challenge, approach and results of Project PA in this PowerPoint presentation.