Abstract
Innovative ideas are essential to sustainable development. Students’ innovative potential in higher education for sustainable development (HESD) has so far been neglected. Innovation is often associated with an interdisciplinary approach. However, the results of research on diversity and its role in innovation are inconsistent. The present study takes a longitudinal approach to investigating student teams in project-based learning courses in HESD in Germany. This study examines how innovation develops in interdisciplinary student teams in contrast to monodisciplinary student teams. The results of the latent change approach from a sample of 69 student teams indicate significant changes in students’ innovation over time. Monodisciplinary student teams outperform interdisciplinary student teams in idea promotion (convincing potential allies) at the beginning, whereas interdisciplinary student teams outperform monodisciplinary student teams in idea generation (production of novel and useful ideas) in the midterm. There is no difference in the long term. The results indicate that interdisciplinary student teams have an advantage in the generation of novel ideas but need time to leverage their access to different discipline-based knowledge. We discuss practical implications for the design of interdisciplinary learning with strategies to support students in the formation phase in project-based learning in HESD.
Highlights
Innovation is essential to ensure global sustainable development (SD)
Enabling students to create change for sustainability is an unemployed resource in higher education for sustainable development (HESD) [1]
The results reveal that group problems, such as poor project management, a lack of supervision support, ineffective communication, and students’ risk aversion, are barriers to a creative climate in HESD
Summary
Enabling students to create change for sustainability is an unemployed resource in higher education for sustainable development (HESD) [1]. Both the generation of novel and useful ideas and the promotion of those ideas to gather alliances and coalitions for change, might be accessible to sustainability researchers and practitioners, and the generation: students. Few studies have investigated the status quo of students’ creativity within the field of SD [2,3] or their creativity skill development through HESD [4,5,6] or evaluated educational settings regarding their potential to enhance creativity in HESD [7,8,9]. The present study takes initial steps toward investigating students’ innovation in HESD
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