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Purpose: In collaboration with their home cities, universities increasingly develop courses in which students investigate urban sustainability challenges. This paper aims to understand how far-reaching the collaboration with urban stakeholders in these courses is and what students are meant to learn from the transdisciplinary pedagogies. Design/methodology/approach: This research is designed as a qualitative multiple-case study into the intentions of transdisciplinary courses in which universities collaborate with their home cities: Delft University of Technology in Delft and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions in Amsterdam. The study compares the written intentions of eight courses in course descriptions with the ideal intentions that teachers describe in interviews. Findings: First, seven of the eight investigated courses were designed for urban stakeholders to participate at a distance or as a client but rarely was a course intended to lead to a collaborative partnership between the city and students. Second, the metacognitive learning objectives, such as learning to deal with biases and values of others or getting to know one's strengths and weaknesses in collaboration, were often absent in the course descriptions. Learning objectives relating to metacognition are at the heart of transdisciplinary work, yet when they remain implicit in the learning objectives, they are difficult to teach. Originality/value: This paper presents insight into the levels of participation intended in transdisciplinary courses. Furthermore, it shows the (mis)alignment between intended learning objectives in course descriptions and teachers' ideals. Understanding both the current state of transdisciplinarity in sustainability courses and what teachers envision is vital for the next steps in the development of transdisciplinary education.

TU Delft education system is transformed on three levels: (1) new courses and projects in existing B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs for multidisciplinary and reflective learning; (2) new M.Sc. programs focusing on multi and interdisciplinarity, personal development, and professional skills; and (3) central Interdisciplinary Projects for Master Students from different programs. With these steps, the university offers students a learning ecosystem where identity-building can occur, fosters interdisciplinary teamwork, and strong interaction with the professional world and government is necessary to finish projects. In this article, the ecosystem will be explained, and results will be shared of surveys among students who experienced learning in the learning ecosystem. The surveys show that students understand their future role in the community as engineers, feel that they have acquired new skills, feel better about framing complex problems, and are more competent to work in the industry.

Introduction: Under the label of 'Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)', increasing efforts have been made over the past decade to make research and innovation (R&I) more open and inclusive to improve the way we solve today's complex challenges. However, no commonly accepted norms or standards on the practical implementation of RRI currently exist. One of today's challenges is how to facilitate its implementation within science education. This article aims to contribute to the necessary conceptual and practical grounding of RRI in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics) education by developing a framework of RRI competencies and by gaining insight into secondary school STEAM educators' practices and perspectives on teaching RRI competencies. It adds to an emerging research field in which science education contributes to solving real-world problems by focusing on competencies needed to participate in RRI processes. Methodology: After developing a Comprehensive Framework of RRI Competencies in STEAM education, we engaged secondary school teachers (n=40) involved in innovation within the education project Xplore Health (XH). Participants were recruited through purposive and homogenous sampling from three cities in Spain (Barcelona, Granada and A Coruña). Through one focus group in each city, we analysed teachers' perspectives on how well RRI competencies in the Framework were covered using the XH's educational resources and on how that coverage could be improved. Results: The results show that teachers encounter important limitations in addressing competencies within all the RRI process requirements: reflexivity, anticipation, inclusion and responsiveness. They suggested learning methods and actions for improving that coverage in secondary STEAM education. Discussion and conclusions: We conclude that the Comprehensive Framework of RRI Competencies helps teachers reflect on how to innovate in STEAM education and that Community-Based Participatory Research facilitates the development of most of the competencies teachers considered difficult to apply with the other approaches.

Several studies have shown the effect of information activism and microinterventions, such as I Am Here International, the Elves and #NAFO to combat information disorder and hate online. Nevertheless, microinterventions have yet to be conceptualised in promoting media and information literacy (MIL) and informational resilience. This study positions microinterventions as information activism tools and empirically tests microinterventions in the context of higher education. Using an action research approach at a university MIL training course, we aim to understand what types of information activism are used and how the collective interventions affected the participants' MIL-s. We construct a typology of information activism roles and corresponding study tasks: the Worker Bees (focused on microprotections), the Meerkats (microaffirmations) and Lions (microchallenges). These different types surfaced in each participant over a cycle of exhaustion, disappointment, group support, feedback and encouragement that we dubbed the phoenixing cycle.

Despite ongoing insecurity, Afghanistan has demonstrated improvement in health outcomes. Reasons for this success include a strategic public-private health service delivery model and investment in Afghan health care workforce development. Afghan universities have the primary responsibility for ensuring that an adequate health care workforce is available to private and public health care delivery settings. Most entry-level health care providers working in Afghanistan are educated within the country. However, university constraints, including faculty shortages and limited access to professional development, have affected both the flow of the health care workforce pipeline and the skill levels and competencies of those who do enter the workforce. Aware of these constraints and workforce needs, the administration at Kabul University of Medical Sciences (KUMS), working in collaboration with the Ministry of Higher Education, prioritized investment in strengthening technical and academic capabilities within four faculties (anesthesiology, dentistry, medical laboratory technology, and midwifery). KUMS partnered with the University of Minnesota in 2017 with United States Agency for International Development support through the University Support and Workforce Development Program. Together they established a unique training-of-trainers (TOT) faculty development program to improve faculty knowledge and skills specific to their technical expertise, as well as knowledge and skills in instructional design and research methods. In this article, we describe the successes and challenges associated with partnership development, implementation, and sustainability.

Background: When novice teachers start working in a school, it is vital that they are aware of the moral aspects of the work environment and can use their moral abilities to make their work not only successful, but also right. To map these moral abilities, we developed the Moral Authorship Questionnaire for self-assessment. Objective: This paper reports the initial test of the structural validity and reliability of the developed self-assessment questionnaire. Setting: Dutch student teachers, novice teachers and more-experienced teachers in primary and secondary education participated in this research. Method: To test the psychometric qualities of the attitude scales, we used Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Pearson correlations. Results: The initial test resulted in reliable and valid subscales consisting of 69 Likert items in the renewed questionnaire. Next, the Pearson correlation between the subscales was calculated. Finally, the Pearson correlations between the domains were calculated to validate the construct of Moral Authorship. Conclusion: The test results show that the six tasks of moral authorship can be measured using Likert items. The questionnaire can be used as a tool for self-assessment and reflection on one's moral abilities in one's professional learning environment. Further testing to adjust the questionnaire is needed to improve the personal moral authorship profile, or 'the moral selfie'.