JUUREVA

JUUREVA implements at the University of Oulu the outcomes of the Erasmus+ Teacher Academies TESTEd project (2022–2025), which successfully developed a European competence framework for teacher educayion. JUUREVA narrowed the focus around three converging challenges:

• Education for sustainability,
• Democratic education and active citizenship, and
• AI disruption and digital wellbeing

And identified overlapping, cross-cutting competences shared by those challenges:

• Critical thinking,
• Systems thinking,
• Ambiguity tolerance,
• Intellectual humility, and
• Interdisciplinarity

Those main three challenges reshape the world that today's students will inherit and work in. Climate breakdown is forcing a reckoning with assumptions long taken for granted in economic, political, and everyday life. Democratic institutions face strain from disinformation, polarisation, and the erosion of shared epistemic ground. And generative AI is rapidly reconfiguring education, cognition, labour, and the cultural infrastructure of knowledge production. Each challenge demands more from teachers than transmitting content about it. They demand the capacity to support students in thinking with others across difference, holding uncertainty, and exercising agency under conditions of incomplete information. JUUREVA's competence framework names those capacities and links them to concrete pedagogical practices.

Locating this work at the level of university teachers reflects a strategic alignment with the University of Oulu's own institutional commitment to generic skills: the competences every graduate should carry into professional life, regardless of discipline. Sustainability literacy, democratic engagement, and AI competence map directly onto that institutional agenda and strategy. Equipping the educators who teach across degree programmes is, in this sense, the most leveraged and cohesive way to embed the framework, considerably more so than producing student-facing materials in isolation.

JUUREVA is also, deliberately, an exploratory project of a kind that is structurally uncommon. The usual European project lifecycle ends with a closing event, an archived website, and dissemination activities that taper within months. JUUREVA takes a different stance: it treats TESTEd's outcomes not as artefacts to be archived but as resources to be mobilised, tested, and adapted within a host institution. In doing so, it attempts to answer a question that the Erasmus+ funding structure rarely allows partners to pursue: what happens to a successful project once its funding ends, and what does responsible stewardship of its outputs actually look like in practice?

To carry this out, JUUREVA coordinates an inter-unit collaboration at the University of Oulu, bringing together the Faculty of Education and Psychology (FEP), OPE-keskus (the university's centre for higher education pedagogy), the LINGUA sustainability group (who recently published a booklet with sustainability ideas), and the University of Oulu Sustainability Specialist. The collaboration's purpose is to share expertise, align overlapping goals across these units, and consolidate parallel sustainability efforts that have, until now, operated in relative isolation from one another.