Professor Inga Schmidt-Ross and Professor Susanne Hensel-Börner who work at Hamburg School of Business Administration reached out to us to discuss a potential collaboration with our project and we had the great pleasure of meeting with them earlier in the week. The school has a great opportunity to help students to connect real-world sustainability challenges to the subjects they learn at the school, since the students have the opportunity to work with organisations alongside their studies. We were told about the great work the professors have been doing with the design of courses and assessment of students and have reached out for help about how we can support teachers to develop their ideas for sustainability education.
Our work can contribute to the efforts made to help students and teachers to work with capacity building for the sustainability competences. We discussed the differences between the frameworks that have been provided in research (Barth et al., 2007; Bianchi et al., 2022; Brundiers et al., 2020; Redman & Wiek, 2021; Wiek et al., 2011) to explain the development of the sustainability competencies and how they can work together to provide an integrated problem-solving competency for sustainability. After listening to lecturers across Europe there seems to be a unanimous understanding that intrapersonal and implementational thinking competencies are very important to the work of sustainability capacity building and some say perhaps most important. Intrapersonal thinking (to have self-awareness and self-efficacy mindset) is possibly the least addressed at some disciplines in higher education. An interdisciplinary perspective could help overcome these challenges.
When we meet at the symposium to discuss our work with sustainability competencies in higher education, we expect that an interdisciplinary group will help to provide insight about this challenge. We would like to thank Professor Inga Schmidt-Ross and Professor Susanne Hensel-Börner getting in contact with us and we look forward to future collaborations. We also look forward to meeting you both, and everyone else that has reached out to let us know they have submitted to come meet us in person at the symposium (February 22-23rd in 2024).
This week’s reflection questions are: How do you feel towards the sustainability competencies discussed in research? Do you use any support tools to apply the competencies in the sustainability education you teach? How can interdisciplinary opportunities be created to help strengthen this work with student capacity building for sustainability?
References
Barth, M., Godemann, J., Rieckmann, M., & Stoltenberg, U. (2007). Developing key competencies for sustainable development in higher education. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 8(4), 416–430. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676370710823582
Bianchi, G., Pisiotis, U., & Cabrera, M. (2022). GreenComp, the European sustainability competence framework. European Commission. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/13286
Brundiers, K., Barth, M., Cebrián, G., Cohen, M., Diaz, L., Doucette-Remington, S., Dripps, W., Habron, G., Harré, N., Jarchow, M., Losch, K., Michel, J., Mochizuki, Y., Rieckmann, M., Parnell, R., Walker, P., & Zint, M. (2020). Key competencies in sustainability in higher education—Toward an agreed-upon reference framework. Sustainability Science, 16, 13–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00838-2
Redman, A., & Wiek, A. (2021). Competencies for Advancing Transformations Towards Sustainability. Frontiers in Education, 6, 785163. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.785163
Wiek, A., Withycombe, L., & Redman, C. L. (2011). Key competencies in sustainability: A reference framework for academic program development. Sustainability Science, 6(2), 203–218. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-011-0132-6
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