Pedagogy

Pedagogy is at the heart of education, shaping how educators inspire curiosity, critical thinking, and ethical engagement. It encompasses the strategies, methods, and approaches that facilitate learning and empower students to engage with the world compassionately. Rooted in a commitment to intellectual and personal growth, pedagogy extends beyond the classroom—it is a transformative force that shapes societies and equips individuals to address global challenges.

For educators, pedagogy is a powerful tool for designing meaningful learning experiences, adapting to diverse student needs, and integrating values such as sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility into education. Effective pedagogy fosters environments where learners feel inspired to explore, innovate, and collaborate, building both knowledge and the skills needed to create a more equitable and sustainable future.

Within the PRME community, pedagogy serves as a cornerstone for embedding sustainability and responsible management into higher education. PRME transforms pedagogy in responsible management education by providing certifications, fostering communities of practice, and recognizing innovative teaching through certifications and awards. Through faculty development initiatives, workshops, and collaborative networks, PRME equips educators with tools to implement transformative teaching.

As you explore pedagogy in the context of PRME, we invite you to reflect on its potential to shape responsible leaders and foster global collaboration. Together, we can leverage the power of education to address today’s pressing challenges and create a more sustainable tomorrow.

Background and Motivation

Business leaders are undeniably one of the most important agents to create sustainable positive development for the world. Today, there is an urgent need for world leaders who can leverage interconnected, dynamic and holistic skills to tackle the global challenges society faces. However, business schools often fall short by using pedagogies that focus exclusively on the development of cognitive skill sets. To cultivate leaders capable of addressing today’s challenges, business schools need to adopt innovative pedagogical approaches for holistic skill and mindset development. To fulfil this mandate, PRME has worked in partnership with The LEGO Foundation to advance the Learning Through Play agenda in advancing life long learning through creative and critical interventions in the classroom. By creating creative and meaningful classroom experiences, students and educators become better equipped to manage the challenges and skills needed for today’s world.

The PRME Impactful Five (i5) project emerged in response to two urgent needs:

1. Preparing responsible leaders to tackle social, economic, and ecological challenges through holistic skill-building.

2. Enhancing business education’s relevance in an evolving landscape of micro-credentials, digital learning, and lifelong reskilling.

Project Summary

The three-year i5 project transformed Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) leadership education by integrating playful learning into responsible management education. While traditional leadership programs emphasize cognitive skills, The i5 project set a global agenda for valuing pedagogy in leadership education, institutionalizing a systemic shift toward holistic development. By integrating creative, emotional, social, and physical skill training alongside cognitive learning, i5 cultivated well-rounded, adaptable leaders. It introduced five core playful learning characteristics, each tied to a key leadership skill:

By leveraging collaborative, meaningful, joyful, and engaging learning methods, i5 empowered educators within the PRME community to reshape leadership education. The project primarily targeted business school educators, with students (18–28 years old) as the ultimate beneficiaries.

Scaling for Long-Term Impact

The first three years laid the foundation for scaling innovative pedagogical approaches globally. To ensure long-term sustainability, the project must be further embedded in institutional structures and systems. Future efforts will focus on:

• Expanding adoption across business schools worldwide.

• Tracking the long-term impact on educators, students, and alumni as they become global leaders.

By institutionalizing playful learning, the i5 project continues to shape the next generation of responsible, adaptive, and impact-driven leaders.

LEGO’s Learning Through Play

Prior to the development of i5, extensive research on impactful and creative pedagogies in K-12 education laid the groundwork for our i5 interventions in business school pedagogy. The LEGO Foundation and LEGO Education champion a bold and innovative approach to learning: Learning Through Play. Grounded in the belief that play is a fundamental driver of creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking, their work demonstrates how engaging, hands-on experiences can empower learners to explore, experiment, and solve complex problems. By integrating playful methodologies into education, the LEGO Foundation and LEGO Education aim to develop holistic learners who are equipped with the skills and confidence needed to navigate an ever-changing world.

This philosophy aligns seamlessly with the goals of business and management education within the PRME framework. As the world faces increasingly interconnected global challenges, fostering responsible leaders requires a shift from traditional, lecture-based approaches to dynamic, learner-centered experiences. Learning Through Play offers educators powerful tools to create participatory and inclusive environments that encourage innovation, ethical decision-making, and sustainable problem-solving.

By adopting playful pedagogies, educators can inspire students to approach challenges with curiosity and resilience, preparing them to design and implement sustainable solutions that drive meaningful change in business and society. Explore how the principles of play can transform management education and empower the next generation of leaders to build a better, more sustainable future.

For more information on LEGO’s Learning Through Play work, please see:

• Neuroscience and Learning Through Play

• Playful Learning and Joyful Parenting White Paper

• Where Global Science Meets Playful Learning: Implications for Home, School, Cities and Digital Spaces White Paper

• Learning Through Play and the Development of Holistic Skills Across Childhood White Paper

• Learning Through Play: Increasing Impact, Reducing Inequality

• Learning to Cope Through Play

• Learning Through Play at School White Paper

• A Distance Learning Guide to Playful Distance Learning - Online and Offline

• Children, Technology and Play Research Report

• Neuroscience and Learning Through Play: A Review of the Evidence

• Closing the Skills Gap Position Paper

• Play Facilitation: The Science Behind the Art of Engaging Young Children White Paper

• Learning Through Play and the Development of Holistic Skills Across Childhood

Diver Deeper into Alternative Pedagogies

As industries evolve and sustainability challenges become more urgent, future leaders must develop holistic skills and perspectives. While PRME focuses on creative pedagogies to equip the next generation for these challenges, we recognize there are many innovative approaches in education. Below is a selection of various pedagogical methods that educators may find useful in their classrooms.

Constructivist Pedagogy

Constructivism in education is a theory positing that people learn not through the passive acquisition of knowledge through direct instruction, but through a guided process of constructing an understanding of the world through personal experiences, social interaction, facilitated dialogue, active participation in one’s learning, and the integration of new information and learning into existing knowledge and prior learning. Since its emergence in the mid-20th century as an insightful and stern reaction to the hierarchical and teacher-centric tradition of 19th century education, constructivism now constitutes one of the most influential philosophies in 21st century education (Krahenbuhl, 2016). Moreover, the constructivist critique has inspired the development of a wide variety of reformist and critical teaching theories and practices that continue challenging assumptions of what currently constitutes both good practice in teaching specifically, and inclusive, equitable, and lifelong quality education for all more generally as articulated in SDG-4 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, n.d.).

Ecopedagogy

Ecopedagogy is not an education about ecology but an education through ecology, meaning that it is an education based on an ecological worldview. A worldview is the fundamental understanding of life and the world. Ecological worldview means the ecological approach to the understanding of life and the world. The basic ideas of the ecological worldview come from the science of ecology, of which there are two interpretations: ecology of stability and ecology of instability. Both provide a general, shared outline of the world and how it works but each offers distinctive values of philosophy, ethics, culture, and society with regard to the ecosystem. Ecopedagogy, which encompasses both ecological worldview and education, develops into two broad movements: philosophical ecopedagogy and critical ecopedagogy. The former, referred to as ecosophy, focuses on the metaphysical investigation of the human-nature relationship and related issues in education. For the latter, ecojustice, the mission is to critique the injustice and oppression involved in environmental issues and to construct a utopian society of planetary civilization. (Hung, 2021) It not only has meaning as an alternative project concerned with nature preservation (Natural Ecology) and the impact made by human societies on the natural environment (Social Ecology), but also as a new model for sustainable civilization from the ecological point of view (Integral Ecology), which implies making changes to economic, social, and cultural structures. (Antunes & Gadotti, 2005).

Education for Sustainable Development

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aims to equip learners with the knowledge, skills, and values to address environmental, social, and economic challenges. It goes beyond just learning about these issues; ESD aims to empower individuals to make informed decisions and take action towards a more sustainable future. This includes fostering critical thinking, collaboration, and a sense of agency, all while respecting cultural diversity and promoting lifelong learning. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) sees education as the key to unlocking progress in all the global development goals. It teaches individuals to make informed decisions and take action, both individually and collectively, to change society and protect the planet. It equips people of all ages with the knowledge, skills, values, and ability to tackle issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, overuse of resources, and inequality that impact the well-being of people and the planet. ESD advocates for learning that is: cognitive; improving how we think and understand information, socio-emotional; building social skills, empathy and emotional intelligence, behavioral; encouraging positive actions and behaviors. ESD is a powerful strategy to transform education, covering what we learn, how we learn it, and the environment in which we learn. It is a lifelong learning process that is an integral part of a quality education.

Feminist Pedagogy

Feminist pedagogy is a pedagogical framework grounded in feminist theory embracing a set of epistemological theories, teaching strategies, approaches to content, classroom practices, and teacher-student relationships. Feminist pedagogy is concerned with existing and historical power systems and relations while also incorporating the concept of intersectionality. (Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, 2015) Higher education first encountered the term “feminist pedagogy” in the 1980s when it was coined to characterize a variety of teaching methods then emerging out of women’s studies programs and progressively adopted by instructors in other disciplines (Shackelford, 1992). Early candidates for a feminist reading of their disciplinary theories, principles, and practices included economics (Shackelford, 1992), advertising (Stern, 1992), and marketing (Maclaran et al., 2022), but of course no area of the management education curriculum would escape feminist scrutiny, including accounting (Lehman, 2019). In addition, and in response to the growing appeal for greater diversity, inclusion, and equity across society generally, management education embraced feminist principles as both ethically grounded and good for business (UNC Pembroke, 2021).

Global Citizenship Education

Economically, environmentally, socially and politically, we are linked to other people on the planet as never before. With the transformations that the world has gone through in the past decades – expansion of digital technology, international travel and migration, economic crises, conflicts, and environmental degradation – how we work, teach and learn has to change, too. UNESCO promotes global citizenship education to help learners understand the world around them and work together to fix the big problems that affect everyone, no matter where they're from. Global Citizenship Education is about teaching and learning to become these global citizens who live together peacefully on one planet. Unlike citizenship – special rights, privileges and responsibilities related to "belonging" to a particular nation/state, the global citizenship concept is based on the idea we are connected not just with one country but with a broader global community. So, by positively contributing to it, we can also influence change on regional, national and local levels. Global citizens don't have a special passport or official title, nor do they need to travel to other countries or speak different languages to become one. It's more about the mindset and actual actions that a person takes daily. A global citizen understands how the world works, values differences in people, and works with others to find solutions to challenges too big for any one nation. Citizenship and global citizenship do not exclude each other. Instead, these two concepts are mutually reinforcing.

Indigenous Pedagogy

Indigenous pedagogy is a teaching method that connects aboriginal stories as a guiding path toward knowledge, relying on the relationships between people and nature with broad, holistic interconnectedness. The role of Indigenous pedagogy is to promote learning through four distinct areas: 1) Personal and holistic, 2) Experiential, 3) Placed-based learning, 4) Intergenerational. (Source). Personal and holistic learning is a reference to the previous understanding of holistic education through the Holism-Pluralism-Action Orientation (HPAO) vision for student competency of actionable learning. Holistic learning, in an Indigenous framework, allows students to be highly reflective on their experiences within a learning setting. This sets the groundwork for free and meaningful education. This, of course, leads to experiential and place-based learning which has been discussed through the impacts of experiential and authentic learning objectives. Students engage in observable and natural learning with a connection to the location, and in groups, that are related to experience. An example would be to actively engage in learning at an Aboriginal center. Intergenerational learning is unique to Aboriginal education, as the role of elders has a large impact on the learning experience. Elders are older and experienced members of a community and are regarded as a key component of Indigenous education.