Toward designing sustainability education programs: a survey of master’s programs through semi-structured interviews

Abstract

With the emergence of sustainability science as an academic field, sustainability education (SE) has increasingly been discussed in terms of nurturing students’ competencies to bring about environmental innovation and global sustainability. The requirements of SE include covering a wide spectrum of knowledge from diverse disciplines and collaborating with real-world stakeholders to solve the sustainability issues being faced in society. A number of SE programs have been implemented at university level, often teaching various methods and tools (e.g., life cycle assessment) and offering project-based learning. However, relatively less knowledge is available to understand how existing SE programs were designed, particularly in terms of the relationship between vision (e.g., expected competencies that students will obtain), curriculum, and admission policy. This paper aims to clarify the opportunities and challenges in designing SE programs at master’s level, through semi-structured interviews and online surveys at 14 leading universities that already run SE programs in Australia, Europe, North America, and Japan. Based on the interviews and surveys, the relationship between expected graduates’ careers, curriculum, and faculty organization was analyzed. The results of comparative analysis revealed that the existing SE programs can be classified into two categories according to graduates’ careers—specialist-oriented programs and generalist-oriented programs. Although the core competencies with which students are to be equipped vary depending on the program, curriculum contents across the categories share identical concepts in sustainability science. From an institutional perspective, it is important to incentivize faculty members to sustain and enhance SE programs. Arguably, fair evaluation systems need to be established for faculty members and SE programs.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 4.

Table 4 List of interviews about master’s sustainability education programs

Appendix 2

See Table 5.

Table 5 List of questions used in interviews

Appendix 3: evaluating the diversity of sustainability education programs with Shannon’s index

In order to evaluate the diversity of SE programs based on graduates’ careers, we use a diversity index or Shannon index (Shannon and Weaver 1949) by assuming an analogy of evaluating biodiversity as follows:

$${H_i}= - \sum\limits_{{c=1}}^{S} {{p_{i,c}}\ln {p_{i,c}}} ,$$

(1)

where H _i is the diversity of SE program i according to graduates’ careers, p _i is the proportion of total samples represented by career type c (e.g., private sector, public sector, and university), and S is the number of career types, respectively.

Finally, we obtain the normalized diversity of program i by the following equation:

$$\overline {{{H_i}}} =\frac{{{H_i}}}{{\sum\nolimits_{{k=1}}^{n} {({{{H_k}} \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{{H_k}} n}} \right. \kern-0pt} n})} }},$$

(2)

where n means the number of SE programs of concern.