Integrative Approaches to Sustainable Development at University Level: Making the Links

This book highlights not only the challenges of integrating a fuzzy and highly contested concept like sustainable development into higher education, but also the many creative and innovative entry points that students, researchers and university staff find to collaboratively address it. Built largely on descriptions and analyses of practical experiences from Europe, North America and Australia, it showcases a variety of techniques and environments that encourage learning, as well as how these relate to the backgrounds, needs and capacities of different stakeholders.

The book is divided into two parts, one of which looks at the different ways integration can be approached. This discusses the following aspects:

·         obstacles and potential of transdisciplinary teaching and student learning with participation of practitioners (Chapter 2);

·         the establishment of a T-shaped curriculum in Canada, which tackles the challenge of educating students to become “environmental integrators”, i.e. equips them with skills and knowledge that balance the needs for specialists and generalists (Chapter 14);

·         how sustainable development in a computer science degree in the UK can increase students’ awareness of legal, social, ethical and professional implications of their practice (Chapter 24); and

·         how an emancipatory and critical approach to environmental education supports self-reflection and cultural education, and in turn the internalization of sustainable development for employees at a Brazilian university (Chapter 25).

The second part focuses on convergent approaches with a wide range of good practice examples of curricula, organizational changes and trainings. For example, Chapter 34 describes a green roof and campus greening effort, where landscape architecture students critically interrogate and engage in innovative design, development, monitoring and evaluation processes. University College Cork and its Green Campus initiative exemplify how universities can act as role models, benefiting the sustainable development of the university itself, but also helping students to become environmentally and socially responsible members of their communities (Chapter 41).

Book note prepared by Julia Wesely