Abstract

Problem statement: With Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) being an innovative approach to educational change, its principal objective is students’ development of transformation competencies. However, HESD evaluations hardly consider students’ perspectives. This study presents a study that examined undergraduate students’ view on the HESD approach at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany) and aims at shedding light on their acceptance and perceptions of such an HESD learning setting. Approach: For this purpose, two corresponding surveys were carried out that analyzed the impact of such a curriculum design on undergraduate students of the 2nd and 4th semester. Results: A high rate of 75.4% of the undergraduate students indicated their commitment towards the Leuphana University study model. Simultaneously they showed a sophisticated understanding of the concept of sustainability and agreed with the values associated. Comparing the results of three different student groups with variation in the degree of sustainability related studies, a group of students studying sustainability in their minor as a second subject beside disciplinary oriented studies showed a significant higher acceptance rate than their study peers. Conclusion: These results suggest that the Leuphana University holistic HESD education approach may not only be attractive to inherently sustainability affiliated prospective students but particularly also to open, tolerant and cosmopolitan young people that are interested to attend interdisciplinary sustainability studies besides their major study subject. Thus, the learner-centered approach is connected to students’ lifeworld experience, which provides an opportunity to also attract those students that might be less familiar with the sustainability concept.

Highlights

  • The future oriented concept of sustainable development, firmly established in international political discourse, clearly poses a challenge that asks for a societal reorientation on different levels

  • This study presents a study that examined undergraduate students’ view on the Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) approach at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany) and aims at shedding light on their acceptance and perceptions of such an HESD learning setting

  • A high rate of 75.4% of the undergraduate students indicated their commitment towards the Leuphana University study model

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The future oriented concept of sustainable development, firmly established in international political discourse, clearly poses a challenge that asks for a societal reorientation on different levels. Disciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary, problemoriented approaches and allows for the integration of different types of knowledge for solutions of practical relevance For such a re-design, at least four learning goals need to be considered: Integrating sustainable development into the curriculum: The implementation of ESD in higher education is the subject of numerous case studies that analyze different approaches of integration (Blewitt and Cullingford, 2004; Corcoran and Wals, 2004; Leal, 2000). About 250 different projects are presented and the broad variety of presentation forms visualizes the creative potential of students (workload: 75 h)

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