University teaching staff and sustainable development: an assessment of competences
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
University teaching staff and sustainable development: an assessment of competences Walter Leal Filho1,2 · Vanessa R. Levesque3 · Amanda Lange Salvia1,4 · Arminda Paço5 · Barbara Fritzen4 · Fernanda Frankenberger6,7 · Luana Inês Damke8 · Luciana L. Brandli4 · Lucas Veiga Ávila9 · Mark Mifsud10 · Markus Will11 · Paul Pace10 · Ulisses M. Azeiteiro12 · Violeta Orlovic Lovren13 Received: 25 March 2020 / Accepted: 27 September 2020 © Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Teaching about matters related to sustainable development requires not only a personal motivation from educators, but also a variety of competences. This paper reports on a multi-country study, which aimed at identifying the level of importance given to desired competences on sustainable development by teaching staff at a number of higher education institutions. On the basis of the findings, the paper identifies the gaps and outlines some of the needs which should be addressed, via which competence building may help to foster the educational and societal transformation towards sustainability. The implications of this paper are twofold. First, it emphasises the value of and the need for competences on sustainable development. Second, it illustrates some of the needs which should be met to provide a framework among which competences on sustainable development may be further developed. Keywords Competences · University · Teaching staff · Sustainable development · Higher education
Introduction: teaching sustainable development at universities Universities have been assuming the traditional role of being leaders and mentors in society (White 2015), adapting themselves to new contexts and needs. Built on the ultimate aim to ‘transform our World’ (UN 2015), the UN document Agenda 2030 clearly reconfirms “ambition to strive for holistic, integrated, interdisciplinary education” (Lovren 2017), calling for all education institutions, and in particular universities, to contribute to this complex transformative process. A difficult mission has been assigned to higher education institutions (HEIs) to prepare employable professionals for the knowledge-based economy and, at the same time, to educate reflective citizens, who would contribute towards ending poverty, injustice and environmental and climatic degradation in the world. As such, there has Handled by Mark W. Anderson, University of Maine School of Economics Winslow Hall Orono, United States. * Amanda Lange Salvia [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
been a renewed focus on identifying needed competences, especially those related to teaching and education outcomes (Rieckmann and Gardiner 2015; Levesque and Blackstone 2020). Meeting these highly demanding tasks requires reorientation of existing structures within the university, as well as a redefinition of the role of students, teachers, and researchers (Steiner and Posch 2006). Further, universities need to develop sustainability-concerned
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