Chapter 2 Why Sustainability in Teaching and Learning?
Why Sustainability in Teaching and Learning?
University Priorities
This section is adapted from “Rationale” in Embedding Sustainable Development Goals in Teaching and Learning, by Aditi Garg, published by the University of Saskatchewan in 2023. Its purpose is to provide the context and rationale for the Sustainability Faculty Fellows program.
Where
As an institution with a settler-colonial history, we work through nākatēyihtamowin / nakaatayihtaamoowin (University of Saskatchewan, 2018b), a principle of sustainability intended to protect and honour the wellness of all humanity and creation across Treaty 6 and the Homeland of the Métis. It is through relationships that we all advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
While this book is available to anyone, strategic references are made to actions on this land. You are encouraged to connect with your own land’s history and stories. To find out who the Indigenous Peoples of your land are, you can visit the Native Land app. This will help you better reflect how local actions toward the SDGs can have global impact.
Why
In its strategic plan, USask commits to being “The University the World Needs.” Achieving this places a high priority on the SDGs. As the plan articulates, “Only by addressing the interlinked social, economic and environmental challenges captured by the SDGs will it be possible to tackle climate change and protect the planet, while at the same time creating a prosperous, just and equitable society” (University of Saskatchewan, 2018a, para. 1).
What
Sustainability in teaching and learning, or education for sustainable development, is the deliberate construction of learning experiences—across disciplines—so that graduates can demonstrate proficiency in competencies for a sustainable future. Learning for sustainability is reflected in core competencies that encompass the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to transform systems as required for a regenerative future.[1]
Reliable learning for sustainability includes the following:
- Course outcomes that focus on competencies
- Instructional design that centres students’ agency to reflect, share, and act
- Progression in abilities due to iterative practice and feedback
- Assessment of students’ competencies
USask must commit to deliberately designing courses and programs to systematically build sustainability competencies in our students.
Students See Value in Learning for Sustainability
Many students view learning for sustainability as an opportunity to develop higher-order thinking skills. Reflecting, sharing, and acting on sustainability can “help things stick” (Whalen & Paez, 2021, p. 117). In the 2022 global Skills for Sustainability survey of science and engineering students, 59% of survey respondents felt that projects and activities related to the SDGs were useful for addressing sustainability, yet only 30% had learned about the SDGs. Respondents identified that a sustainability mindset and experience with critical thinking and creativity were most important for addressing challenges related to a sustainable future. Students and recent graduates identified empathy as one of the most important traits of a sustainability practitioner (Siemens DISW, 2023).
Empathy—to understand and share the feelings of another—can be described as the heart of sustainability. Thus, we present the heart set, mindset, and skill set as the three domains for successful teaching and learning in sustainability. These are nested within each other—the heart changes the mind, which directs the hands (skills).
Student Competencies
Students come to higher education with a wide range of experiences and prior knowledge—students are not empty vessels to be filled. Lev Vygotsky’s theory instructs us to build on what they know. Constructivism, building on prior knowledge within one’s zone of proximal development (see Chapter 1), is necessary because of the complexity of learning for sustainability (Armstrong, 2015).
Sustainability, the resilience of our ecosystems, is built on systems thinking and the interplay of interdisciplinarity. Key sustainability competencies provide an “ambitious knowledge and skill profile” in a “constellation of values, abilities, attitudes, knowledge, understanding, mastery and habits of mind and body that are functionally linked to support critical, open-minded, future-oriented and global forms of thinking and being that evoke purposeful behaviour towards sustainability goals for a resilient society” (Pacis & VanWynsberghe, 2020, p. 578).
At USask, this galaxy of possibilities has been distilled into six competencies. Here are proposed criteria for how a student may demonstrate that they are developing capacity. To help us assess the Sustainability Faculty Fellows program, students were asked to reflect before and after their course experiences on how they perceived their capacity in the following six competencies (see also Table 1 in Chapter 1 for student ratings).
| Competencies for sustainability | As a new graduate, I can… |
|---|---|
| Communicating meaningfully |
|
| Engaging in our intercultural society |
|
| Nurturing successful relationships |
|
| Leveraging technology |
|
| Using adaptive design and problem-solving |
|
| Cultivating well-being |
|
Language adapted from Association of American Colleges and Universities (2009), UNESCO (2017), UNESCO (2018), Wiek et al. (2016).
Criteria simplified and clarified for the university context using OpenAI (2023).
Works Cited
Armstrong, C. (2015). In the zone: Vygotskian-inspired pedagogy for sustainability. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 50(2), 133–144.
Association of American Colleges and Universities. (2009). Valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education (VALUE). https://www.aacu.org/initiatives/value
Garg, A. (2023, April). Embedding Sustainable Development Goals in teaching and learning. University of Saskatchewan. https://openpress.usask.ca/sdgs/
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
Pacis, M., & VanWynsberghe, R. (2020). Key sustainability competencies for education for sustainability: Creating a living, learning and adaptive tool for widespread use. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 21(3), 575–592. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijshe-12-2018-0234
Siemens DISW. (2023). Skills for sustainability: The student voice. Petrus Communications.https://resources.sw.siemens.com/en-US/analyst-report-the-student-voice-report-for-the-skills-for-sustainability-survey
UNESCO. (2017). Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning objectives.https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247444
UNESCO. (2018). Learning to transform the world: Key competencies in education for sustainable development. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000261802
University of Saskatchewan. (2018a). Critical path to sustainability. In University plan 2025. https://plan.usask.ca/sustainability/
University of Saskatchewan. (2018b). The deep roots of our principles. In University plan 2025. https://plan.usask.ca/the-deep-roots-of-our-principles.php
Whalen, K., & Paez, A. (2021). Student perceptions of reflection and the acquisition of higher-order thinking skills in a university sustainability course. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 45(1), 108–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2020.1804843
Wiek, A., Bernstein, M. J., Foley, R. W., Cohen, M., Forrest, N., Kuzdas, C., Kay, B., & Keeler, L. W. (2016). Operationalising competencies in higher education for sustainable development. In M. Barth, G. Michelsen, M. Rieckmann, & I. Thomas (Eds.), Routledge handbook of higher education for sustainable development (pp. 241–260). Routledge.
- These are described through the six USask undergraduate competencies in the table to follow. ↵
