Alternative learning activities that foster competences for sustainable development in higher education

The call for education to contribute to a sustainable society is an important new challenge of the 21st century. It emerged in response to complex anthropogenic issues such as climate change, desertification, habitat destruction, poverty, pandemics, war. The belief that education can contribute to a sustainable society that is more equipped to solve these complex issues, has been affirmed in many international reports. Sustainable development in higher education requires a dynamic and a holistic way of teaching. It is not educational to teach students that sustainability is a fixed, pre- and expert determined occurrence to be reproduced (Wals & Jickling, 2002). One of the main challenges for higher educators is to design learning activities that will allow students to effectively acquire sustainability competences (Mintz & Tal, 2013). In the review on competences for sustainable development, Wiek et al. (2011) propose five key competences: interpersonal competence, systems-thinking competence, anticipatory competence, normative competence and strategic competence. There is a fundamental lack of research available on the effectiveness of learning activities in yielding sustainability competences. This study aimes to address this lack of knowledge by researching how sustainability competences can be effectively developed among students through learning activities. In order to do so, three eminent learning activities were researched in a multiple case study regarding the development of sustainability competences. We opted for three different learning activities: a stakeholder simulation game, a service learning project and an interdisciplinary project. These learning activities were dealt with in separate courses. The simulation game took place during one class while the two other projects were worked on during an entire semester. Three different groups of students participated: master students of environmental, health & safety management and business engineering from the Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences at Leuven University, master students industrial engineering from the Faculty of Industrial Sciences at Leuven University, and bachelor students language from Université Saint Louis. The data was collected through surveys, focus groups and observations and demonstrated what sustainability competences students perceived to have developed and how effective they believed these individual learning activities were in yielding competences. The results demonstrate that students perceived to have developed sustainability competences in each learning activity, although in somewhat varying levels. Students perceived the simulation-game to have developed sustainability competences in moderate levels. The interdisciplinary project scored exceptionally high on the interpersonal competence, whilst the service-learning project mostly developed the normative- and the anticipatory competence. The results indicate that these learning activities can be regarded as effective educational approaches in yielding sustainability competences among students. These learning activities can be implemented by higher education institutions in their quest to find educational approaches that foster competences for sustainable development among students. To ensure the development of a wide-spectrum of sustainability competences, higher educators would be advised to combine different approaches, as they seem to promote different sustainability competences. In addition, results show that students enjoy participating in these learning activities, a feature that cannot be underestimated in the attempt to develop competences among students. References Lambrechts , W., Mulà, I., Ceulemans , K., Molderez , I., & Gaeremunck , V. (2013). The integration of competences for sustainable development in higher education: an analysis of bachelor programs in management. Journal of Cleaner Production , 48, 65-73. Mintz, K., & Tal , T. (2013). Education for sustainability in higher education: a multiple-case study of three courses. Journal of Biological Education , 47 (3), 140-149. Wals , A., & Jickling, B. (2002). Sustainability in higher education: from double think and newspeak to critical thinking and meaningful learning. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education , 3 (3), 221-232. Wiek, A., Withycombe, L., & Redman, C. L. (2011). Key compentencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development. Sustainability Science, 6, (2), 203-218.status: accepte