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Key competencies in sustainability in higher education—toward an agreed-upon reference framework

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Abstract

Hundreds of sustainability programs have emerged at universities and colleges around the world over the past 2 decades. A prime question for employers, students, educators, and program administrators is what competencies these programs develop in students. This study explores convergence on competencies for sustainability programs. We conducted a Delphi study with 14 international experts in sustainability education on the framework of key competencies in sustainability by Wiek et al. (Sustain Sci 6: 203–218, 2011), the most frequently cited framework to date. While experts generally agreed with the framework, they propose two additional competencies, suggest a hierarchy of competencies, and specify learning objectives for students interested in a career as sustainability researcher. The refined framework can inform program development, implementation, and evaluation to enhance employability of graduates and facilitate comparison of sustainability programs worldwide.

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Fig. 1

adapted from Wiek et al. (2011); icons credit: Warren et al. (2014)

Fig. 2

adapted from Wiek and Lang (2016, p.35), with permission of the authors. Each approach emphasizes a particular step (bolded) ordering the sequence of steps. The competencies per step are depicted through colors (purple: systems-, green: futures-, yellow: values-, turquoise: strategic-thinking, orange: collaborative competency). Grey boxes depict implementation, which, so far, is done by practitioners outside the collaborative research process. The TSR framework presents a synthesis of the four other frameworks combining two complementary processes (forecasting and backcasting) along the first three steps

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Notes

  1. Christiana Figueres, https://globaloptimism.com/.

  2. Two experts participated with their teams. While they provided their contribution to the Delphi-study as one team, they are now listed individually as co-authors.

  3. Respondent 10 is marked with an (*) as this respondent withdrew their participation due to a conflict of interest.

  4. In the remainder, we use the term transdisciplinary research methods as short shrift for methodologies facilitating collaborative research between academics and practitioners with action research being one of them. Interdisciplinarity refers to collaborative research among academics from different disciplines.

  5. Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (RT) was developed by Anderson et al. (2001). It builds on Bloom’s Original Taxonomy (OT) from 1956 while addressing its shortcomings: (1) The OT combined ‘having knowledge’ with the cognitive processes of ‘acquiring knowledge’ into one dimension. The RT breaks this into four dimensions of knowledge: factual: knowing the basic elements of a discipline, conceptual: knowing the relationships among the basic elements, procedural: knowing how to do something and metacognitive: knowledge about cognition, awareness of own cognition. (2) The OT presents learning objectives hierarchically within one knowledge dimension. The RT presents them in a matrix, connecting the four dimensions of knowledge with the six levels of learning objectives (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create) (Amer 2006).

  6. Dweck (1999, 2006) defined mindset as a self-perception or self-theory that people hold about themselves and applied the concept of mindset to people’s self-perceptions as learners (intelligent or unintelligent learner), or in their professional or personal lives (being a good teacher, being a bad parent). Glossary of Education Reform (2013).

  7. Educating Future Change Agents Research Project: https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/cgsc/research-projects/educating-future-change-agents.html.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful comments and suggestions. We also like to thank the experts who participated in the study and Drs. Elyzabeth Engle, Eban Goodstein, Ian Thomas, and Arnim Wiek for their valuable comments to earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Katja Brundiers

  2. Institute of Sustainable Development and Learning, Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany

    Matthias Barth

  3. Department of Pedagogy, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

    Gisela Cebrián

  4. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA

    Matthew Cohen, Weston Dripps & Geoffrey Habron

  5. Institut Hydro-Québec en Environnement, Développement et Société, Laval University, Québec, Canada

    Liliana Diaz

  6. Department of Environmental Sciences, Bellevue College, Bellevue, WA, USA

    Sonya Doucette-Remington

  7. School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Niki Harré

  8. Department of Sustainability and Environment, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, USA

    Meghann Jarchow

  9. Kapiʻolani Community College, University of Hawaiʻi System, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Kealalokahi Losch

  10. School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Jessica Michel & Michaela Zint

  11. Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, UNESCO, New Delhi, India

    Yoko Mochizuki

  12. Department of Education, Faculty of Education and Social Sciences, University of Vechta, Vechta, Germany

    Marco Rieckmann

  13. School of Earth and Sustainability, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

    Roderic Parnell

  14. Falk School of Sustainability, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Peter Walker

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Correspondence to Katja Brundiers.

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Handled by Mark W Anderson,University of Maine School of Economics Winslow Hall, United States.

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Brundiers, K., Barth, M., Cebrián, G. et al. Key competencies in sustainability in higher education—toward an agreed-upon reference framework. Sustain Sci 16, 13–29 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00838-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00838-2

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