ABSTRACT
Until now, I have focused mainly on how sustainability as a concept influences educational practices in higher education as well as the ongoing development of education for sustainable development within educational science. But, as I briefly pointed out in the section on sustainability in the first chapter, with every discipline involved there is also an influence in the opposite direction. Sustainability science relies on a broad range of disciplines, some of which have proved to be of fundamental importance, that is, natural science (McMichael 1997), engineering (Mihelcic et al. 2003) and social sciences (Ascher 2007). Thus, the question remains how and to what extent the various sciences in general and educational science in particular can contribute. In the preceding chapter, I looked into the concept of social learning being the first area that can bridge sustainability science and educational science. In the following sections, I will discuss three more distinct areas of research and the unique contributions that educational science can make to them. To complement these more theoretical considerations, there will be practical examples of how educational concepts in these areas have been applied to sustainability.
