Author

Nduduzo Phuthi

Title

Fifth (5th) ESDIIR Conference

News

In the last five years, the Faculty of Science and Technology Education at NUST has run an annual conference entitled Education for Sustainable Develoment Interdisciplinary International Research (ESDIIR). As I write, the 5th Conference (2025) is under way, running under the theme: Innovative pathways to education for sustainable development: Leveraging technology, promoting inclusivity and cultural heritage for a resilient future. The array of keynote and research papers presented so far, and others in the programme, address a variety of current sustainability issues including technology integration and AI applications in teaching and learning, climate change, innovative pedagogy, inclusivity, and sustainable development as related to education. The guest speaker highlighted the importance of transformative leadership in higher education to bring about the changes envisaged in the UN SDGs, noting that the world still faced what he called the 'wicked challenges' of poverty, ill health, ignorance, illiteracy, strife, among others.

In the 4th edition of the Conference in 2024, by special invitation, a number of papers were presented specifically by members of the EU-ZW Project on topics related to the on-going project. The papers covered research areas in renewable energy, circular the economy, the quality improvement process (QIP), remote labs, training using ICT, the flipped classroom in relation to challenge-driven learning, and others. However, in the current conference, there was little participation from EU-ZW researchers in the conference, probably because there was no special invitation. It is hoped that in future, members of EU-ZW will diarise the conference and the conference organisers will send calls directly once again.

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