The Partnership for Education and Research about Responsible Living (PERL)

The Partnership for Education and Research about Responsible Living (PERL) was a group of educators and researchers who spent more than a decade learning about the values at the heart of sustainable schools and societies.

PERL ran from 2008-2011
PERL 2 ran between 2013-2015, funded by the Erasmus Academic Network project of the European Lifelong Learning Programme

The PERL/PERL2 project was funded by the Erasmus Academic Network project of the European Lifelong Learning Programme, as a large multidisciplinary partnership of educators and researchers from over 140 institutions in more than 50 countries. It worked to advance sustainable and responsible living by focusing on consumer citizenship, education for sustainable consumption, social innovation and sustainable lifestyles, through a core of working groups supported by a consultants’ network.

Members of the Values and Sustainability Research Group participated in a PERL2 working group entitled ‘Bridging the knowledge-action gap’, to design values-based approaches to Education for Sustainable and Responsible Living in secondary schools.

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Disseminating knowledge about sustainability issues is rarely enough, in itself, to motivate long-term behaviour change. Focusing on global problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and poverty often serves to increase people’s sense of despair and helplessness, and may result in apathy rather than positive action. An alternative approach, however, is to help people to reflect on what is important to them in life - their core values - and to envision the type of future that they want on the basis of those values. This approach has already been found useful for closing 'value-action gaps' in organisations promoting non-formal education for sustainability.

Building on the initial PERL project which ran from 2008-2011, the stated aims of the PERL2 project as a whole were to strengthen individual awareness of sustainable and responsible living, identify processes and new skills, share insights and cultivate partnerships.

Within this wider project, the first work package – Bridging the knowledge-action gap – was dedicated to values-based indicators, and designed to apply learning from the successful ESDinds project within the formal education sector. While traditional models of Education for Sustainability focus on the dire consequences of what has gone wrong, this work strand fostered a more positive and constructive approach, based on helping students to understand their values and create visions of the future that they want. There were four key objectives, as follows:

To prepare a toolkit for teachers explaining the use of the ‘WeValue’ approach, developed during the ESDinds project
To train teachers in the use of the toolkit
To translate the toolkit into Spanish or Portuguese
To test the toolkit in two schools in different EU countries

The values PERL recognised included, among others, trust, compassion, creativity, empowerment, and care and respect for the community of life. The research was used to create a set of Values-Based Learning activities and assessment toolkits for secondary school (high school) teachers and students.

There are three toolkits that are complementary in their uses:
• Measuring What Matters - Values-Based Indicators: While values underly much of human behaviour, they have long been considered intangible and unmeasurable. New methods and indicators pioneered by a European Union-funded research project
show how values are expressed and can be measured. This module explains the background and approach for those who want to create their own indicators adapted to their needs.
• Discovering What Matters: A journey of thinking and feeling: To what extent have students already acquired the values, as well as the skills, knowledge, attitudes and personal qualities, which will enable them to survive and thrive in the 21st century?
• Growing a Shared Vision - A toolkit for schools: Are we ‘walking our talk’ as educators? Is our school a living example of a vibrant, sustainable community? Do we provide a supportive learning environment for staff and students, and empower them as agents of positive change? This toolkit provides tools to assess whether the educational environment we create for our students facilitates acquiring responsible values.

An early finding was that merely changing the wording of the ‘WeValue’ materials, initially created for civil society organisations, was not enough to make them relevant and useful for busy teachers. Rather, it was necessary to separate out three different applications of the ‘WeValue’ approach – teaching and learning, strategic planning, and evaluation – and develop each one as a separate toolkit.

New indicators and activities, tailored specifically for schools, were also found to be necessary. Through pilot tests in secondary schools in the UK and Finland, we were able to identify which activities worked well and which were less successful within different contexts, e.g. whole-class sessions versus Student Council meetings. Detailed findings are available in the toolkit testing report and further tests are ongoing at a school in the Netherlands.

The findings of the workgroup were presented at the PERL project conference held in March 2015 at UNESCO, Paris.The values-based indicators approach has attracted attention within the context of the Global Action Plan for Education for Sustainable Development and the 10-Year Framework of Programmes, and new large-scale funding bids are planned.

Findings from the project were soon cited in the International Environment Forum’s response to a consultation on the report Indicators and a Monitoring Framework for Sustainable Development Goals: Launching a data revolution for the SDGs, published by the Leadership Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) in January 2015. In this report, it was noted that our work provides a practical way of responding to ‘Complementary National Indicator 4.1 [Percentage of girls and boys who acquire skills and values needed for global citizenship and sustainable development by the end of lower secondary education]’, and may be useful for developing the national benchmarks called for by SDSN in relation to this indicator.