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This study aims to explore student craft teachers’ conceptions of sustainable craft. This is an important issue because the Finnish National Curriculum of Basic Education emphasises sustainability, especially in craft education, and teachers play a vital role in preparing pupils to meet the future challenges. Because the concept of sustainable craft is open-ended, there is a need to rethink pedagogy in craft education and higher education.

The data were collected in the form of essays from future craft teachers (N41) studying craft science in the Finnish higher education system. The essays concerned both general conceptions of sustainable craft and reflections on the student teachers’ craft practices. The data were analysed using grounded theory to gain a deep understanding of how student craft teachers conceptualise sustainable craft. The data were quantified and statistically assessed for dependencies between variables and transferability of results.

The study revealed that sustainable craft is conceptualised as a system and that student teachers approach sustainability from different orientations: practice, product, immaterial and holistic.

The emerging theory offers a new concrete tool for understanding the abstract concept of sustainability in higher education and suggests that sustainability can be addressed through tangible methods of craft. This theory proposes craft as a tool to conceptualise of sustainability for broader use in education for sustainability (ESD) and as a concrete tool for developing pedagogy for ESD.

The digital age has provided new possibilities for the connected learning. To better understand these opportunities in the school context, the purpose of this paper is to examine what kinds of learning communities emerge in international learning projects and how tools and technologies support students’ inquiries and peer connections.

The participants in this study were one Finnish 6th-grade class (n=17) and one American 7th–8th-grade class (n=16) who communicated through blogs and Skype. The main sources of deductive content analysis are transcribed Skype meetings, the students’ digital artifacts and a supplementary e-questionnaire.

The results of the study indicated that during the academic learning project, a voluntary, friendship-driven peer community emerged. The interaction in the formal contexts focused on sharing the results of local inquiries through Skype and blogs, whereas the friendship-driven community centered on the creation of social bonds through students’ personal devices and social media applications.

The paper models a hybrid learning system that connected academically oriented and friendship-driven participation.