Peer-mentoring at the intersection of education for sustainable development and visual arts education

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aims, through a collaborative partnership among countries and stakeholders, 'to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path' (United Nations [UN], n.d., preamble). This can only be achieved through lifelong learning and education. In fact, the fourth sustainable development goal (SDG), specifically SDG 4.7, aims to 'ensure that by 2030 all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote Sustainable Development (SD), including among others through Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)' (UN, n.d., para. 4.7). The Erasmus+-funded action research project PEERMENT, which ran between 2017 and 2020, explored the potential of peer-mentoring in enhancing the practice of ESD through sharing knowledge and experience and through providing an opportunity to learn from different perspectives. The need for this project arose from two primary considerations: ( 1) implementation often lags behind policy in ESD and (2) peer-mentoring is largely untapped in the European formal education systems, even more so regarding ESD. The aim of this chapter is twofold: to provide a blueprint for organizations that would like to strengthen the practice of ESD through the tool of peer-mentoring and to explore the synergies that exist between ESD and visual arts education (VAE), suggesting a way forward to show how, through peer-mentoring, this synergy could be exploited further.