Fostering Skills for Sustainability – Lessons Learnt from Curriculum Design and Learning Outcomes

Abstract

Sustainability thinking plays a key role in business development and transformative approach for a safe, sustainable and prosperous future. Education is expected to take action to provide meaningful learning opportunities in different settings and contexts to foster critical thinking thereby understanding the importance of sustainable lifestyles, a climate-neutral economy and a fair society.

Given the increased responsibility of higher education providers for preparing students as future responsible change agents, the study analyzed the curriculum design to foster sustainability skills of students in the particular case of the educational project for cooperation in higher education, implemented from 2020 to 2022. A quantitative survey was conducted aiming at assessing the learners' satisfaction and the fulfillment of learning outcomes, drawing up findings and improvement gaps to facilitate further exploitation of results.

The findings suggested the improvements from one session to another and the positive changes induced through the aid of course objectives, specific learning outcomes, and the correlation between sustainability themes, SDGs topics, and subjects taught. These stimulated the acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes toward sustainability as well as hands-on opportunities to change the status quo, to improve teaching and learning, enabling a better alignment of curricula outcomes in the area of business engineering education.

Finally, the authors highlighted the curriculum content and methodological approach may be used and adjusted in different educational settings boosting synergies with other initiatives of a similar nature in other institutional and national contexts.

Keywords: sustainable development, curriculum design, learning outcomes, sustainability skills, quality education