The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa (TD) is pleased to feature a written interview between Editor-in-Chief Prof Izak van Zyl and Dr Ben de Souza, author of the article “Transdisciplinary approaches to integrating inclusivity and sustainability in teacher education”. The article has attracted exceptional reader interest, reflecting the growing importance of research that addresses complex educational challenges through innovative and collaborative approaches.

In this study, Dr de Souza explores how inclusive education, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and teacher education can be brought together through a transdisciplinary framework. Drawing on research conducted in Malawi, Tanzania, and Eswatini, the article demonstrates how teacher educators, student teachers, community members, and institutional leaders can work collectively to develop meaningful and sustainable educational change, even in contexts with limited resources.

In the written interview that follows, Dr de Souza reflects on the origins of this research, the development of the Sustainable Inclusive Pedagogical Proficiency Process (SIP3) model, the lessons learned from working across diverse Southern African contexts, and the practical implications of his findings for teacher educators, policymakers, and educational leaders. The exchange highlights the transformative potential of transdisciplinary research and offers valuable insights for those seeking to advance inclusion, sustainability, and social justice in education.

Dr Ben de Souza responded in writing to questions from Prof Izak van Zyl about the study and its wider implications.

1. Your article brings together inclusive education and Education for Sustainable Development, which are often treated as separate priorities. What first led you to recognise that these two areas needed to be considered together?

Indeed, inclusive education and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are treated as separate if not competing priorities. My interest has a long history. I trained as a secondary school teacher where I worked with learners with different disabilities. I then moved to teacher education where I was training teachers when I realized that teachers are not being adequately trained in inclusive pedagogy. This led me to do a Master of Education specializing in inclusive education. The question of ESD started emerging towards the end of the MEd journey when I started questioning the sustainability and transformative power of inclusive education. I realized that inclusive education needs to form a transdisciplinary relationship with ESD. I pursed my PhD under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Heila Lotz-Sisitka at Rhodes University trying to look at this relationship, especially in teacher education.

2. For readers who may be unfamiliar with the term, how would you explain a transdisciplinary approach to teacher education in simple terms?
Terms multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary are often misunderstood and used as synonyms. Let me focus on transdisciplinary approach. This is an approach whereby different knowledge disciplines are brought together to form a research question and/or methodology that intends to explore a certain problem. However, this approach goes further by including different stakeholders that transcends the disciplines. For example, in my research, I brought issues of inclusive education (which primarily comes from disability studies), ESD (which comes from sustainability science) and teacher education (which manifests in education foundations). So, what I did was to work with participants in teacher education contexts involved in Change Projects. The Change Projects involved teacher educators, student teachers, institutional leadership, school learners and community members.

3. Your research involved teacher educators in Malawi, Tanzania and Eswatini. What did working across these three contexts reveal that a study conducted in only one country might have missed?
I actually started looking at 11 countries. The intention was to look at all Southern African countries that were involved in Rhodes University/ UNESCO’s Sustainability Starts with Teachers. However, this proved to be a lot of work for a PhD, so I narrowed down to 3 countries. Southern Africa is moving towards integration and I believe our research approaches need also to move towards the same. If I did my research in one country only, I would have missed a lot of comparative cross-country insights that are relevant to the whole of Southern Africa. For example, I found that in Malawi the main weakness was on inclusive education, in Tanzania was on ESD and in Eswatini was on teacher education. So, countries learned from each other in terms of strengths and how to improve on weaknesses. I think this also forms part of the transdisciplinary approach.

4. One of your important findings was that participants began to understand inclusion more broadly – not only in relation to disability, but also in terms of participation, belonging and social justice. What contributed most strongly to this shift?
What contributed to this shift is the kind of the research design I employed. I implemented the transdisciplinary approach through a formative intervention research design. In this design, the researcher works with participants on areas they ask to be supported. Thus, a researcher does not bring anything for the participants to do. I facilitated a critical dialogue that made the participants themselves realize that their understanding of inclusive education was limited. Also, ESD helped them to see this limitation and started conceptualizing it more broadly.

5. The article includes practical examples such as inclusive lesson planning, peer learning, community-based projects and producing cooking briquettes from waste paper. Which example best illustrates the connection between inclusion and sustainability for you, and why?
I think they are all good examples, but what is lying behind this is the concept of reusing and recycling. For example, often teachers complain that they cannot implement inclusive education because government does not provide the relevant materials. At the same time, there is a lot of waste within institutions that teachers and learners can reuse and recycle to make inclusive materials. So, in my research, they started recycling to make materials. Because the Change Projects were also involving community members, we were looking at the value that these community members could gain from the teacher education Change Projects. So, they learnt that they can actually borrow the concept of recycling, instead of making learning materials they could make briquettes for cooking, solving an energy problem they experience in their communities. If these community members were not involved in these teacher education Change Projects, it is very doubtful if they would have had an opportunity to learn this knowledge. Here again we see the power of transdisciplinary approach.

6. Were there any findings or responses from the teacher educators that surprised you or challenged your own assumptions?
Yes, and a lot of them. As I said earlier, I used a formative interventionist research design. This research design in a very democratic one if a researcher really needs to work towards transformation. For example, in one workshop in Malawi, we discussed the problem with a wooden model they were using for recycling. I did not have any idea how they could improve it. But when I visited the Change Project again, I found that they made a collaboration with an artisan within the community to make a metal model using small pieces of metal available throughout the community. And this metal model became more inclusive as people with physical disabilities could also use it and it became more sustainable because the wooden one used to break now and again. This was the turning point of the Change Project. And now, some years after the research, the practice is continuing and some have turned it into entrepreneurship.

7. Your findings show that teacher educators can introduce meaningful changes even where resources are limited. What are some realistic, low-cost practices that teacher education institutions could adopt?
Governments will always be overwhelmed so they cannot supply all the needed materials and services to the schools. I believe teacher educators should instill this kind of thinking in the teachers they train so that they come up with innovative measures to alleviate the problem. And the best starting point is to look within their surroundings. Something that others can see as waste or useless, can be a very good resource to make change. Actually, in all the Change Projects I worked with in Malawi, Tanzania and Eswatini, they never needed any extra monetary costs. We worked within the institutional structures to maximize the utilization of resources and achieve the goals of the Change Projects. We had a zero budget for the implementation of the Change Projects.

8. At the same time, the study identifies structural barriers such as limited infrastructure, inflexible curricula and insufficient specialist support. What kinds of institutional or policy support are most urgently needed for local innovations to be sustained?
I think the most urgent support needed is policy. You see teacher educators and school teachers cannot do anything contrary to the education policy. The current policies do not even see any link between inclusive education, ESD and teacher education. There were some things that educators were interested to do in changing the assessment models when training teachers. For example, a pre-service teacher can be assigned to produce a certain learning material from waste that can be used to respond to a particular problem in the schooling context. But they could not do that because the institutional and policy requirement is that they must sit for written examinations only. So, there is a need to realign our institutional requirements and policy stipulations with the realities of the transformative education. Good work has started with the 2022 SADC Regional Strategic Framework for ESD, and countries are expected to develop national ESD plans based on the SADC framework. I think if countries can get serious with making these policy commitments, SADC will have a very good post-2030 education future.

9. The research process itself appears to have contributed to participants’ professional learning. How did the collaborative workshops and reflective discussions help produce change?
Again, I will repeat the issue of formative interventionist research design. Often, researchers approach research as a product where they write a proposal, go into a certain setting, extract data and write their outputs. I took a very different approach. I took my research as a project implementation, thus making research a process of transformation. The collection of data formed a very small percentage of what I was supporting in the Change Projects. For the findings reported in the article, you can see that the data is very small but I spend almost 3 years working with the participants. The idea was not research for the sake of research, but research for transformation. It was through this careful and extended engagement with the participants that professional learning emerged. You cannot expect learning and change to happen when you just go interview people and leave.

10. The article introduces the Sustainable Inclusive Pedagogical Proficiency Process (or SIP3) model. What does this model offer teacher educators and institutions in practical terms?
The SIP3 model is the first of its kind whereby it provides research-practice framework for integrating inclusivity and sustainability issues in teacher education. The model has been well received within Africa, and it has attracted international attention. I have been in Finland at the University of Jyväskylä looking at the ways of enriching this model together with my collaborator Dr Heidi Layne. I am now in Germany at Leuphana University of Lüneburg collaborating with Professor Harald Hantke, Professor Daniel Fischer, Ms Deepika Joon and others to see how the model can be operationalized in different contexts. And thanks to DAAD for supporting this work. Practically, the model allows teacher educators to translate the teacher education practice into a lived Change Project by finding solutions to problems that are emerging in the education system. The model is generative, meaning that it can be reconceptualized and applied in different ways and contexts. For example, now the model is being reconceptualized for use in TVET. In this field, issues of sustainability and inclusivity are often ignored, yet TVET offers skills-based education that can help persons with disabilities to acquire skills for living. At the same time, TVET is major producer of waste within the education sector because of subjects such as engineering, carpentry and welding, yet recycling is rarely practised in this context. So, the SIP3 model is helping to change the story.

11. What is the single most important message you would like policymakers, teacher educators and university leaders to take from this research?
My single most important message is that do not wait for change to come from somewhere. Start within your context to those who have the platform to do this such as teacher educators. For policymakers and university leaders, you need to support the change processes. Because we can do all the transformative work but if the policy and leadership are not supportive, that work will not take us anywhere. This is why I am also currently involved in Sustainability Starts with Teacher Leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa (the SSATL project). Imagine, if leadership at the university we did a Change Project in Tanzania did not support us, it means that pre-service teachers with disabilities who are enrolled in different programs would still be using paper-based materials for learning and creating a lot of waste and taking a lot of financial resources. The Change Project integrated ICT and now the leadership is able to use the financial resources they were previously spending on purchasing braille machines and paper for other needs within the institution.

12. The article has attracted considerable reader interest and became TD’s most-viewed article published in 2026. Why do you think its subject has resonated so strongly with readers?
I think this interest comes from the fact that I did something unique in that research. It was research for transformation. Also, it is rare to find research that brings together inclusive education, ESD and teacher education. Some researchers have attempted to bring together inclusive education and ESD or ESD and teacher education but not the three notions together. Lastly, the SIP3 model should be a good attraction to anyone intending to do transformative research. My research has also been recognised and commended in other settings including by Prof Jonathan Jansen (a guest editor) through a special issue in the Journal of Education (UKZN) as exemplary PhD research in education.

13. How would you like other researchers or teacher education institutions to build on this work?
The SIP3 model should be seen as a starting point. I will be happy to see researchers adopting and adapting this model in different settings even beyond teacher education and enrich it. It is like the ideas of Lev Vygotsky. They started humbly through seminars and dialogue. Now, so many years after his death, we cannot talk of education and learning without mentioning Vygotsky. This means we have put his ideas to good use. So, I encourage other researchers and teacher education institutions to experiment and improve this work.

14. Finally, what are you working on next, and how does it extend the ideas developed in this article?
My next focus is even more interesting and expanding. I am currently conceptualizing a book that will focus on inclusive pedagogical proficiency. I have realized that for the work I am doing to enter teacher education and schooling practice, there is a need of a key textbook that will help practitioners with the knowledge of pedagogy needed in the post-2030 education agenda. I am working and having collaborations across the world so that this book is not about (Southern) Africa but about knowledge in whatever context. I am having academic collaborations across in Africa, Germany, Finland, Japan, UK, Luxembourg and many other countries.

This written interview with Dr Ben de Souza highlights the power of transdisciplinary research to address some of the most pressing challenges facing education today. By bringing together the principles of inclusive education, sustainability, and teacher development, his work demonstrates that meaningful transformation can begin within local contexts and be amplified through collaboration, innovation, and supportive leadership. The SIP3 model offers a promising framework for educators and institutions seeking practical pathways toward more inclusive and sustainable educational futures.

The interview also reflects a broader theme at the heart of The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa: the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries to generate new knowledge and create real-world impact. As complex societal challenges increasingly require integrated approaches, transdisciplinary scholarship has a critical role to play in shaping research, policy, and practice across the region and beyond.

TD welcomes high-quality original research, reviews, conceptual contributions, and case studies that advance transdisciplinary thinking and practice. Researchers, practitioners, and scholars from diverse fields are encouraged to submit manuscripts that address contemporary challenges through collaborative, innovative, and boundary-crossing approaches. We invite prospective authors to contribute to the ongoing dialogue by submitting their work to The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa and joining a growing community committed to research that informs transformation and sustainable development.

About the journal

The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa is dedicated to promoting the concept of transdisciplinary research.
It is aimed at creating knowledge with the collaboration of the formal sectors of the natural and human sciences as base. Over and above this, the intention is to focus on levels of knowledge that are to be found at grassroots level.