Abstract
Project-based sustainability courses require and facilitate diverse interactions among students, instructors, stakeholders, and mentors. Most project-based courses take an instrumental approach to these interactions, so that they support the overall project deliverables. However, as courses primarily intend to build students’ key competencies in sustainability, including the competence to collaborate in teams and with stakeholders, there are opportunities to utilize these interactions more directly to build students’ interpersonal competence. This study offers insights from project-based sustainability courses at universities in Germany, the U.S., Switzerland, and Spain to empirically explore such opportunities. We investigate how students develop interpersonal competence by learning from (rather than through) their interactions with peers, instructors, stakeholders, and mentors. The findings can be used by course instructors, curriculum designers, and program administrators to more deliberately use the interactions with peers, instructors, stakeholders, and mentors in project-based sustainability courses for developing students’ competence to successfully collaborate in teams and with stakeholders.
Highlights
A just and safe future within planetary boundaries [1,2], as aimed for with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [3], requires partnerships, collaborative efforts, and leadership [4,5]
The transdisciplinary Case Study (tdCS) course and the Action Research Workshop (ARW) course relied on their partnerships with businesses, NGOs, and government agencies, built up over the years and through personal commitment
This study suggests that project-based sustainability courses are uniquely suited to develop students’ interpersonal competence; even more so, if the various interactions inherent in such courses are used deliberatively, beyond just learning-by-doing
Summary
A just and safe future within planetary boundaries [1,2], as aimed for with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [3], requires partnerships, collaborative efforts, and leadership [4,5]. Higher education plays a crucial role in educating future change agents that are knowledgeable and skilled in collaboration [6,7,8,9] as sustainability professionals need to be able to effectively collaborate in inter- and transdisciplinary settings [10] This calls for educational opportunities to develop key competencies in sustainability, such as interpersonal or collaborative competence [11,12,13]. Interpersonal competence, i.e., the ability to collaborate in teams and with stakeholders, is one of the main learning outcomes of such courses [6,16,18,23] It can be fostered by facilitating collective reflection of experiences with all involved project participants [6,16]. Interactions with peers, instructors, stakeholders, and mentors in project-based sustainability courses can be utilized to support students in learning to collaborate in teams and with stakeholders (interpersonal competence). The study’s goal is to inform the design and facilitation of courses to enhance students’ learning experiences and to better align learning outcomes and processes
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