How Does Sustainability Become Professionally Relevant? Exploring the Role of Sustainability Conceptions in First Year Students

Sundermann Sundermann,Fischer Fischer

doi:10.3390/su11195155

Abstract

One of the main objectives of higher education for sustainable development is to nurture holistic conceptions of sustainability in students, so that they can use sustainability as an approach to analyze and solve complex problems in their future professional fields. Existing studies have shown that students differ substantially in how relevant they consider the concept of sustainable development to their future careers. Previous studies have identified socio-demographic characteristics, disciplinary background and past experiences with sustainability education as potential influencing factors. To date, the relationships between one's own “understanding” of sustainability (sustainability conception) and the importance students attach to sustainability has hardly been investigated. This case study offers a first systematic examination of how the perceived professional relevance of sustainability is influenced by different individual characteristics and sustainability conceptions. Based on data from a recent survey of n = 1,364 first year undergraduate students from 14 different major subjects, our findings indicate that in addition to the previously reported individual characteristics like sex and academic affiliation, sociocultural sustainability conceptions are an important influential factor for the perceived importance of sustainability for their professional contexts. However, the regression analysis shows that the model based on predictors found in the literature lacks incremental power. This paper unveils that further research is needed on the underlying factors that explain the strength of perceived relevance of sustainability in students and that these influences need to be taken more into account in curriculum development.

Highlights

Universities and other higher education institutions (HEIs) have been shown to play a critical role in engaging future professionals and decision-makers with sustainability in order to educate a new generation of change agents for sustainable development (SD) [1]
The empirical case study presented in this paper addresses two shortcomings that have been identified in the review of the literature on key concepts (Section 2): (1) The fragmented knowledge about students’ sustainability conceptions and (2) the influences of these conceptions on perceived professional relevance (PPR) of sustainability as antecedents of competence acquisition in comparison to other influencing factors
We first give an overview of descriptive statistics on all variables (4.1) and expand on the results regarding the role of individual characteristics on PPRs focusing in particular on the role of students’ sustainability conceptions

Summary

Introduction

Universities and other higher education institutions (HEIs) have been shown to play a critical role in engaging future professionals and decision-makers with sustainability in order to educate a new generation of change agents for sustainable development (SD) [1]. After early periods of experimentation, orientation and pilot development, efforts to implement and mainstream sustainability as a guiding idea for the design of teaching, research, operation and community outreach have intensified over the period of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and the follow-up Global Action Program [2] Sustainability is increasingly recognized as an important principle for the design of higher education, the actual large-scale implementation of Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) is still largely lacking. Despite the diversity of approaches it seems valid to say that a shared goal of different HESD approaches is to support students in developing an understanding of sustainability that they can use to analyze specific problems and act on

Methods

Results

Conclusion