Inventory and Analysis of Environmental Sustainability Education in the Degrees of the University of Alcalá (Spain)

Abstract

In order to promote education in environmental sustainability at higher education institutions and establish action priorities, a detailed analysis of the initial situation is needed, both in terms of courses offered and teaching and assessment strategies implemented. This article presents a methodology that can be used to standardize the evaluation of teaching in environmental sustainability at different universities. We exemplify its application at the University of Alcalá, located in Central Spain. The inventory was conducted using in-house software development for the extraction of environmental sustainability concepts in the degree courses’ syllabi, completed with a survey to faculty members and a manual review to confirm its adjustment to environmental issues. Those finally selected were analyzed in depth. The main results indicate that currently, only a small part of the courses (5.5%) offered at the University explicitly include environmental sustainability content. The grades that concentrate most of the courses are those of Environmental Sciences, Biology, Economics, Tourism and Pharmacy, with very low occurrence in the grades of Education and Health Sciences. It is concluded that further institutional commitment is needed in the definition of medium-term strategies to guide the training and dissemination efforts in order to promote sound environmental education in university courses.