While there is growing agreement on the competencies sustainability professionals should possess as well as the pedagogies to develop them, the practice of assessing students’ sustainability ...competencies is still in its infancy. Despite growing interest among researchers, there has not yet been a systematic review of how students’ sustainability competencies are currently assessed. This review article responds to this need by examining what tools are currently used for assessing students’ sustainability competencies to inform future practice. A systematic literature review was conducted for publications through the end of 2019, resulting in 75 relevant studies that detail the use of an assessment tool. We analyzed the described tools regarding their main features, strengths and weaknesses, as well as potential improvements. Based on this analysis, we first propose a typology of eight assessment tools, which fall into three meta-types: self-perceiving, observation, and test-based approaches, providing specific examples of practice for all tools. We then articulate strengths and weaknesses as well as potential improvements for each tool (type). This study structures the field of sustainability competency assessment, provides a criteria-based overview of the currently used tools, and highlights promising future developments. For the practice, it provides guidance to sustainability (science) instructors, researchers, and program directors who are interested in using competencies assessment tools in more informed ways.
Envisioning how a desirable future might look is a long-standing effort in human evolution and social change. Utopian thought and visions provide direction for actions and behavior; more so, they ...create identity and community. Accordingly, the discourse on sustainability and sustainable development has recognized that positive visions about our societies’ future are an influential, if not indispensable, stimulus for change. Visioning is, thus, considered a key method in sustainability research and problem solving, for instance, in transformational sustainability science or in planning for urban sustainability. Yet, quality criteria for sustainability visions and guidelines on how to rigorously craft such visions are scattered over different strands of the literature and some are insufficiently developed. The goal of this article is to review and synthesize such quality criteria and design guidelines to inform sustainability visioning methodology. The review provides a concise reference framework for sustainability students, researchers, and professionals on how to enhance their sustainability visioning practices.
Advancing transformations towards sustainability calls for change agents equipped with a new set of competencies. Such sustainability competencies have been articulated with multiplicity and ...ambiguity, which is counterproductive to joint and accelerated progress. A unified framework of sustainability learning objectives would provide guidance to students, educators, and administrators of sustainability programs. To this end, we carried out a systematic review of the relevant literature. After scanning thousands of publications, we identified over 270 peer-reviewed articles of highest relevance, spanning two decades. Despite appearance otherwise, we found that there is a high level of agreement among scholars over the sustainability competencies that students should be trained in. Expanding on the five key competencies, namely, systems-thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic, and interpersonal competence, that have gained widespread use, this article synthesizes the new suggestions made over the past decade into a unified framework. It centers on 8 key competencies in sustainability (the 5 established and 3 emerging—intrapersonal, implementation, and integration competence), which are complemented by separate disciplinary, general, and other professional competencies. This comprehensive framework of key competencies in sustainability is applicable across disciplines and can guide faculty, students, and practitioners in their joint efforts to advance transformations towards sustainability.
Problem- and project-based learning (PPBL) courses in sustainability address real-world sustainability problems. They are considered powerful educational settings for building students’ ...sustainability expertise. In practice, however, these courses often fail to fully incorporate sustainability competencies, participatory research education, and experiential learning. Only few studies exist that compare and appraise PPBL courses internationally against a synthesized body of the literature to create an evidence base for designing PPBL courses. This article introduces a framework for PPBL courses in sustainability and reviews PPBL practice in six programs around the world (Europe, North America, Australia). Data was collected through semi-structured qualitative interviews with course instructors and program officers, as well as document analysis. Findings indicate that the reviewed PPBL courses are of high quality and carefully designed. Each PPBL course features innovative approaches to partnerships between the university and private organizations, extended peer-review, and the role of knowledge brokers. Yet, the findings also indicate weaknesses including paucity of critical learning objectives, solution-oriented research methodology, and follow-up research on implementation. Through the comparative design, the study reveals improvement strategies for the identified challenges and provides guidance for design and redesign of PPBL courses.
The emerging academic field focused on sustainability has been engaged in a rich and converging debate to define what key competencies are considered critical for graduating students to possess. For ...more than a decade, sustainability courses have been developed and taught in higher education, yet comprehensive academic programs in sustainability, on the undergraduate and graduate level, have emerged only over the last few years. Considering this recent institutional momentum, the time is seemingly right to synthesize the discussion about key competencies in sustainability in order to support these relatively young academic programs in shaping their profiles and achieving their ambitious missions. This article presents the results of a broad literature review. The review identifies the relevant literature on key competencies in sustainability; synthesizes the substantive contributions in a coherent framework of sustainability research and problem-solving competence; and addresses critical gaps in the conceptualization of key competencies in sustainability. Insights from this study lay the groundwork for institutional advancements in designing and revising academic programs; teaching and learning evaluations; as well as hiring and training faculty and staff.
•Addressing sustainability challenges requires skills in complex problem-solving.•Solution-oriented sustainability learning (SOSL) programs offer opportunities to acquire these skills.•Arizona State ...University has launched such a SOSL program, with focus on urban sustainability.•We illustrate accomplishments and challenges of implementing an SOSL program.•Lessons learned can help other universities to start or enhance similar programs.
Conventional educational settings struggle with enabling students to acquire competence in collectively solving sustainability problems. Such competence is best conveyed in real-world learning settings. Solution-oriented sustainability learning (SOSL) programs create and utilize such settings. Here, students directly contribute to sustainability-oriented transformations of cities, businesses, or government organizations, while building their proficiency in sustainability problem-solving. SOSL programs, however, often face obstacles such as lack of faculty capacity and insufficient resources. This article reports on experiences from SOSL courses in Phoenix, as part of the SOSL program in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Addressing accomplishments and challenges, we offer constructive lessons to other universities on how to start or enhance SOSL courses and programs.
B Corp certification is considered a viable instrument to support small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in adopting sustainable practices. However, there is a lack of evidence to what extent this ...instrument can anchor sustainability at the core of SMEs. This study investigates the B Corp certification process of a SME, a craft brewery in southern Sweden, regarding the extent to which it helped infusing sustainability into the business’ mission, practices, corporate form, certificates, and capacities. Results show that the B Impact Assessment, as part of the certification process, positively influenced the business’ mission, practices, and capacities. Limited influence on social commitment and adoption of a sustainable corporate form can be explained through regulatory context and time required for deep organizational change. To enhance the effectiveness of B Corp certification, we recommend making it even more adaptable to different geographical and social contexts and increase focus on impact business models.
Successful careers in sustainability are determined by positive real-world change towards sustainability. This success depends heavily on professional skills in effective and compassionate ...communication, collaborative teamwork, or impactful stakeholder engagement, among others. These professional skills extend beyond content knowledge and methodical expertise. Current sustainability programs do not sufficiently facilitate students’ acquisition of such skills. This article presents a brief summary of professional skills, synthesized from the literature, and why they are relevant for sustainability professionals. Second, it presents how these skills have been taught in an undergraduate course in sustainability at Arizona State University, USA. Third, it critically discusses the effectiveness and challenges of that exemplary course. Finally, the article concludes with outlining the lessons learned that should be incorporated into future course offerings.
Transnational collaborations between universities provide an underutilized opportunity to teach sustainability competencies emphasizing the global and local nature of (un)sustainability. This article ...asks: what kind of curricula and teaching-learning environments can we use in transnational collaborations so as to prepare future generations to address (un)sustainability across different scales and contexts? The article presents a glocal model for transnational collaboration for sustainability which combines the use of digital technologies for global collaboration with experiences and engagement for local learning and impact. The glocal model was designed and implemented in The Global Classroom, a collaborative project between Arizona State University and Leuphana University of Lüneburg. The model fills two important gaps in higher education for sustainable development. In the theory, it provides new concepts to think about the curriculum and teaching-learning environment of transnational collaborations for sustainability. In the practice, it presents an exemplary implementation that can inform the curriculum as well as the teaching-learning environment of such collaborations. The article concludes that transnational collaborations for sustainability ought to more systematically integrate curriculum reform with approaches to internationalization and digitalization of higher education.
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