Student's learning processes for sustainable knowledge

Abstract

Introduction: The concept of sustainability has become one of today's most widely used and controversial concepts. It is therefore important to develop activities within all educational contexts in order to increase understanding of the goals for moresustainable practice. This also means that professors themselves must take more responsibility for their assignments, interpret and understand the content of the concept of sustainability and demands for new courses. They need, doubtlessly and naturally, new methods and tools. Traditionally professors plan their lessons, different tasks and how they are to be assessed, entirely themselves. This is now slowly changing not least due sustainability approaches. Today there is demand for more collective learning practices, not only among students, but also among university professors themselves. Objective: This paper aims to study how some students are using the course design to create knowledge on Sustainable Business Development, within the division of Quality Technology of the Department of Engineering Sciences at Uppsala University.Methods: This paper studies Sustainable Business Development a course at Uppsala University in spring 2017, included both theoretical and practical exercises. In this study it was used qualitative and quantitative approaches, inquires, observations,focus group discussions interviews with students as well as documentation over the course design were used as empirical sources.Results: Students learned through both individual and collective learning processes. Literature studies, scalable learning sequences, organized individually, gave them pre-under- standing and the tools for further knowledge. The discussions in groupsclarified and deepened they understanding of sustainability. They experienced that the whole process of learning got easier to manage by collective learning. Research shows that there is a need for balancing these two learning processes to maximizestudents’ learning. The processes of collective learning seem to even support low performing students.Conclusions: The results show that educational organizations are in great need of creating tools and arrange structures and givespace and time for this combined type of learning for all students. This to create understanding for the issues students arelearning in general and not at least on issues of sustainability.