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Educating Students in Real-world Sustainability Research: Vision and Implementation

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Abstract

Readers are invited to imagine students helping to solve real-world sustainability problems brought to them by societal stakeholders and simultaneously learning about and contributing to sustainable changes in society. Effective sustainability research education engages students in just that. Higher education institutions are implementing this vision of education in entire curricula, individual courses, and extracurricular research activities. In this article, we build on the literature to describe a vision of sustainability research education and present an evaluative scheme for measuring its effectiveness. We apply the scheme to two sustainability research-education projects in Switzerland to test its applicability and to identify achievements of the projects and the areas where improvement is needed. Areas for improvement include collaboration between academics and practitioners, joint problem definition, and the guidance of students to participate successfully in collaborative, real-world projects.

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  1. For details about these efforts, please see: http://www.ulsf.org/resources_sust_degrees.htm, http://sustainabilityscience.org/curriculum.html, http://schoolofsustainability.asu.edu/degrees/index.php, http://www.sustainability.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/, http://www.lucsus.lu.se/html/education_at_lucsus.aspx, http://www.icis.unimaas.info/education/must/, http://www.sustain.ubc.ca/.

  2. A peer review process is common practice in academia to ensure credibility of an academic contribution. The “extended peer-review” refers to the same process, but it includes non-academic experts such as stakeholders and decision-makers in the review process to ensure credibility, legitimacy, and salience of the academic and practical contribution.

  3. Ingredient branding is a marketing concept. It means that an ingredient or component is added into an existing product (e.g., GoreTex in outdoor clothing; NutraSweet in diet soft drinks). The ingredient brand has its own brand identity to promote its special features. The inclusion of an ingredient in an existing product improves the existing product. The question then is how to market the improved product. In general, companies strive to relate the ingredient brand to the brand of the initial product to market the improved version. In doing so they hope to tap into customers’ brand awareness of the initial product and of the ingredient.

  4. For details, see http://www.are.admin.ch/dokumentation/publikationen/00014/index.html?lang=en

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and Marcia Nation and Kathryn Kyle (Arizona State University) for helpful comments on previous versions of this article. We would like to thank the advisory board of Seed Sustainability, namely Gabriela Wülser, Christoph Kueffer, Thomas Camerata, Renat Heuberger, and Roger Baud, for their long-standing fruitful collaboration with us. Arnim Wiek acknowledges the support of the Swiss NSF grant PA0011-115315.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, PO Box 875502, 800 S Cady Mall Suite 3, Tempe, AZ, 85287-5502, USA

    Arnim Wiek

  2. Decision Center for a Desert City, PO Box 878209, 21 East 6th Street, Suite 126B, Tempe, AZ, 85287-8209, USA

    Katja Brundiers

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  1. Katja Brundiers
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Correspondence to Katja Brundiers.

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Katja Brundiers

is the Community-University Liaison for the Decision Center for a Desert City and the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She received her M.Sc. in Geography from the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Her research interest focuses on the collaboration between scholars and practitioners in the areas of sustainable urban development, decision making under uncertainty, and social processes of integration and segregation.

Arnim Wiek

is an Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich and his M.A. in Philosophy from the Free University Berlin, Germany. His research interests include sustainability governance, planning and decision-making related to urban and regional development, land use conflicts, depletion of natural resources, emerging technologies, and climate change.

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Brundiers, K., Wiek, A. Educating Students in Real-world Sustainability Research: Vision and Implementation. Innov High Educ 36, 107–124 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-010-9161-9

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