Towards a Rubric for Stimulating and Evaluating Sustainable Learning

Judith Gulikers,Carla Oonk

doi:10.3390/su11040969

Abstract

Preparing students for dealing with sustainability issues is a challenge in the field of education. This is a challenge because we don’t know exactly what we are educating for, as there are no defined answers or outcomes to the issues; the future is unpredictable. Dealing with these issues requires crossing boundaries between people coming from different ‘practices’, e.g., disciplines, cultures, academia versus society, thereby making the learning and working process a challenging but critical learning experience in itself. We argue that education for sustainability should not primarily focus on student content knowledge or development of certain products or answers. It should focus on stimulating students to go through boundary-crossing learning processes critical for getting a grip on the unpredictable future. This allows students to learn to work with ‘others’ around the boundaries, and thereby to develop the ability to co-create new knowledge and work towards innovation or transformation for sustainable practice. Building on the boundary crossing theory and using mixed methods and interventions, this design-based study iteratively develops a boundary crossing rubric as an instrument to operationalise student learning in transdisciplinary projects into concrete student behaviour. This rubric in turn can explicate, stimulate and assess student learning and development in transdisciplinary sustainability projects.

Highlights

Sustainability problems are inherently complex, ill-defined, contested and lack definite solutions
An argument is made for why we developed a rubric as an instrument to visualise boundary crossing learning, and how this instrument is expected to be stimulating for sustainable learning
We aim to operationalise the four learning mechanics in terms of student behaviour when learning and working on sustainability problems in multi-stakeholder, transdisciplinary settings. We argue these learning processes are representative of this learning independent of context, content or sustainability issue at hand. As this operationalisation results from real student behaviour in real transdisciplinary projects in sustainability education [7,32], we argue that the Boundary Crossing Rubric will be instrumental for designing, stimulating or coaching, along with assessing student sustainable learning independent of content [20]

Summary

Introduction

Sustainability problems are inherently complex, ill-defined, contested and lack definite solutions. According to Wals, wicked problems are characterised by their resistance to definition, having no right or wrong answers, and their unfamiliar, ambiguous, chaotic nature, in which conflicts of interests among multiple stakeholders are inevitable [2]. Lönngren and Svanstöm [5] say that for students to contribute to these problems, they need to develop the ability to address and understand sustainability problems in a holistic and integrative manner, while considering the normative context of sustainable development This requires, for example, the ability to reconcile conflicting goals, multiple forms of problem representation and solution methods [6], and even more complex sustainability competencies like systems thinking and normative competencies [7,8]. In Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education; Leal Filho, W., Ed.; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2019

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