Sustainable development in higher education: Different teaching & learning approaches

Linking the economic, social and environmental aspects of any plan, project or activity is fundamental to act according to the sustainable development goals. These three dimensions are interrelated and interconnected in such a way that it is sometimes very hard to discriminate what their individual effects are, or on the contrary, how their joint effects are synergistic. And if this is generically a difficult task, when it comes to education the difficulty becomes even more significant, as one must be very careful defining concepts in an absolutely clear and undoubtful way. While the specialization is required to educate professionals able to accurately project and build these projects, it is now mandatory that everyone is also able to understand the causes and effects of their actions, towards sustainable development. In this Track, different teaching & learning approaches have been presented and discussed, aiming to use Higher Education as a highway to educate the professionals of the near future as strategic partners for the development of different mindsets, able to tackle the real problems.This work was financially supported by project UID/EQU/00511/2019 – Laboratory for Process Engineering, Environment, Biotechnology and Energy – LEPABE and by project UID/EQU/04730/2019 – Center for Innovation in Engineering and Industrial Technology, both funded by national funds through FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC).