Competence Acquisition in Education for Sustainable Development as part of University Studies

With the vision of shaping a peaceful and sustainable world, the United Nations adopted the global sustainability agenda in 2015. 17 goals form the core of the agenda and summarize the fields in which sustainable development has to be strengthened; these include sustainable consumption and production as well as gender equality. High-quality education is an important prerequisite for achieving these goals. ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) forms an important core value and is a learning objective. For example, by 2030, Germany aims to ensure that all learners acquire the necessary qualifications to promote sustainable development, including ESD. The successful implementation of the complex concept of ESD empowers people to think and act in a sustainable and future-oriented way. Development is sustainable when people around the world, now and in the future, can live with dignity and develop their needs and talents whilst respecting planetary boundaries. Such a social transformation requires strong institutions, participatory decision-making and conflict management, knowledge, technologies and new patterns of behavior. Universities are therefore responsible for creating framework conditions in the ESD context.
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Despite projects with great impact and guidelines (e.g. https://www.kit.edu/downloads/KIT-Sustainability-Strategy.pdf), there is currently still a great diversity in higher education focusing on ESD. Similarly, ESD is not widely known in the professional context. This IAG paper presents a teaching-learning format with transfer potential for other personal competences (e.g., professional ethics) that considers this difficulty. It enables students and professional practitioners to individually and collaboratively reflect on ESD and was established as an integral part of a compulsory course in the introductory phase of the German-speaking Bachelor degree program ‘Geodesy and Geoinformatics’ at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany) in cooperation with the professional association DVW (German Association for Geodesy, Geoinformation and Land Management; link: https://dvw.de/dvw-introduction).
This IAG paper describes the newly developed, partially digitally implemented multi-perspective teaching-learning format, consisting of
(i) a thematic introduction organized in collaboration with KIT’s sustainability office;
(ii) interview-based inquiry of KIT students, students of other Geodesy-related degree programs and professional practitioners; hereby students created a catalogue of questions focusing on the recent ESD status (e.g., How does your degree program deal with the topic of ESD?) and future ESD opportunities (e.g., In your opinion, what should the discipline pay more attention to in the ESD context?);
(iii) presentation of the findings as part of a digital outreach-orientated colloquium’s presentation.
In addition, the newly established teaching-learning format enables (i) networking within the discipline, (ii) job profile sharpening, and (iii) socialization regarding participatory further development of the teaching-learning system at an early stage of the study.