NODUS TALKS: Schools as Sustainability Communities
When:
29.09.2026 16:15 – 17:45
Where:
Oodi Helsinki Central Library Saarikoski rug, 3rd floor
Registration period:
08.09.2026 - 29.09.2026 16:00
Event language(s):
English
Goeun Kuu-Park is a participatory design researcher investigating sustainability transitions. Her work explores how people and communities can actively shape sociotechnical transformations toward more sustainable futures, with a particular interest in hands-on material engagement—how building, making, and repairing technologies can reshape how we understand and relate to the world around us.
In this NODUS talk, Goeun presents her doctoral research on schools as living laboratories for sustainability transitions. She explores how co-designing and building energy devices with diverse school members, including pupils, can transform their relationship with energy—not only how they understand it, but also how they use, repair, and maintain it. Through hands-on material engagement, she shows how school communities can collectively explore sustainability challenges and imagine and enact alternative energy futures.
Pasi Pennanen is a former comprehensive school technology education teacher who currently teaches future craft teachers at the University of Helsinki. Drawing on extensive experience in basic education, he is also a doctoral researcher focusing on repair. His professional interests include sustainable consumption and lifestyles, pupil agency, and the promotion of DIY culture in schools.
His research examines how basic education can foster repair activity, repair propensity, and the development of a repair culture. His presentation introduces the first nationwide findings on the state of repair teaching in Finnish schools and discusses its potential to support repair culture, circular economy competences, and pupils’ willingness to repair. From this perspective, repair is part of a broader culture in which repair-related knowledge, skills, and values develop through interactions among schools, families, and society.
All welcome! We’d appreciate if you register using this link but registration is not mandatory.