Adopting sustainability competence‐based education in academic disciplines: Insights from 13 higher education institutions

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have been incorporating sustainability intoeducation and curricula, where recent research has focussed on sustainabilitycompetences, pedagogical approaches, and how to connect them, generally on a sin-gle HEI. The process of integrating sustainability into education based on curriculaassessment has been explained using adoption of innovations; and has the potentialto explain the process of developing competences through pedagogical approaches.The aim of this paper is to investigate this process at academic discipline level. Anonline survey was developed to investigate teaching sustainability competences 13 HEIs, from which 678 responses from educators were obtained. The competencesand pedagogical approaches from the responses were ranked, and then the connec-tions between the competences and pedagogical approaches per discipline wereanalysed using a correlations-based framework, from which three disciplines groupswere created. The groups were categorised using diffusion of innovations theory,which indicated that some disciplines are more innovative than others in adoptingsustainability competence-based teaching. The results are used to propose twoframeworks to better understand the adoption of sustainability competence-basedteaching: (a) the D-RAPID framework; and (b) the Disciplinary Multi-dimensional Sus-tainability Influence Change for Academia (D-MuSICA) memework. The adoption of sus-tainability competence-base education must expand from a single HEI perspective to adisciplinary collaborative one spanning many HEIs, where academic disciplines shouldlearn from each other's insights and mistakes and provide students with more transdisci-plinary skillsets to make societies more sustainable.