Arjen Wals

Background

About Arjen Wals

Arjen Wals is a personal Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University in The Netherlands. He also is a UNESCO Chair in the same field and works on Whole School Approaches to Sustainability as a Guest Professor at the Norwegian University of the Life Sciences (NMBU) Wals has worked at Wageningen University since 1992 in various departments. In addition he was an Adjunct Faculty Member at the Civic-Ecology Lab of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and between 2013-2018 a Guest Professor within the Faculty of Education of Gothenburg University as well as a senior advisor to the Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development (GMV). In the Fall of 2020 he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. His research focuses on learning processes that contribute to a more sustainable world. Wals obtained his PhD in 1991 with a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He has (co)published and (co) edited over 250 articles, chapters and books on topics like: action research & community problem-solving, whole school approaches to sustainability, biodiversity education, multi-stakeholder social learning, and sustainability in higher education. Popular books include:'Higher Education and the Challenge of Sustainability (Kluwer Academic, 2004), Social Learning towards a Sustainable World (Wageningen Academic, 2007) and Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change (2012). In 2014 he co-authored a paper on the need of connect in environmental and science education using 'citizen science'​ as a bridge which was published in Science. Motto: Ultimately, sustainability needs to emerge in the everyday fabric of life - in the minds of people and in the values they live by. Such emergence depends on how and what people learn, both individually and collectively. A central question in my work is how to create conditions that support new forms of learning that take full advantage of the diversity, creativity and resourcefulness which is all around us, but so far remains largely untapped in our search for a more sustainable world.