In order to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) set by the United Nations in 2000, the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation developed the Green Plan (2009) as well as the national reference system for Sustainable Development and Social Responsibility (SDSR). During the last couple of years, the French Higher Education institutions have thus been seriously working out the ways of teaching their students the SDSR. The author of the recent ministerial report Jean Jouzel (2022) urged the universities to raise students’ awareness on these matters.

In this study carried out in one of the French universities, we are interested in the teaching practices used by higher education teachers and pedagogical teams in response to this “supranational political injunction” (Barthes & Alpe, 2012, p. 3). Among other things, we refer to the UNESCO (2017) report outlining learning objectives aimed at reaching Sustainable Development goals, as well as pedagogical approaches addressing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Various studies have identified teaching practices that can foster the Sustainable Development Competences (SDC) (Cavicchi, 2021; Lozano et al., 2017).

In addition to identifying teaching practices, this study allows us to clarify how one can integrate the topics of SD and SDG in different higher education training programmes (Lozano et al., 2015). We will confront these results with students’ perceptions of teaching practices aimed at fostering SD competences (Cavicchi, 2021).

More generally, our study addresses the problem of education for sustainable development in the context of higher education in France. How is it integrated in different programmes? Which forms can it take? We aim at identifying both the place the SD competences take in the higher education programmes and the existing teaching practices used by teachers. We also confront the results with the inputs from the international research.

Our hypothesis is that the SD takes a significant place in the content of the programmes that aim at developing competences in the domain of SD. Our second hypothesis is that university teachers have few teaching practices based on the principles of the transformative learning even if they consider them important.

Our research ground is based in one of the French universities, namely, that of Strasbourg. Having a weak political engagement in implementing the SD education up to now, it has seen an ambitious roadmap proposed for the years to come. For this exploratory study, we have targeted three programmes that explicitly demonstrate the intention of teaching SD. It gave us the target audience of 30 teachers and 150 students. In order to verify our hypotheses, we have conducted a survey in January 2023 among our identified target audience. The survey had four objectives: • to identify the SD topics that both teachers and students considered important to address and those really studied in practice; • to identify the SD competences that both teachers and students considered important to be developed and those really developed in practice; • to have a better vision of the pedagogical practices used by teachers to foster the development of the SD competences; • to identify pedagogical practices based on the principles of the transformative learning and how these practices are perceived by students. We made the choice of using the questionnaire model used for studying inclusive pedagogical practices in the framework of the Inclusive Teaching Strategies Inventory (ITSI) developed by Lombardi and Murray (2011). Its value and originality lies in the fact that it allows to compare the expressed values and intentions with their real application. The questions are thus organised as follows: • I think it is important to… (Likert scale: Strongly disagree/Disagree/I did not think about it/Agree/Strongly agree) • I used in my lesson… (Likert scale: Never/Sometimes/Most of the time/Always/I did not have the opportunity to do it) We have also complemented our questionnaire with the items coming from other models used in scientific or institutional publications. What concerns the topics of SD education, we rely on the 17 objectives of the 2030 agenda (UNESCO, 2017, 2022). As for the competences, we used the reference system offered by Brundiers et al. (2021). We have also made a list of pedagogical practices described in the scientific literature (Cavicchi, 2021; Duguet & Morlaix, 2012; Lozano et al., 2017) and we proposed a classification of the responsible pedagogical practices.

We have currently been analysing the collected data and could present the results during the ECER if our communication is accepted. However, we can already discuss the contribution of our research in respect to scientific knowledge and methodological approach. On the one hand, our study is a part of a larger existing research on the problem of SD education and it relies on the international scientific publications in the domain and the use of the tested methodologies that can facilitate the comparative analysis. On the other hand, we offer a new approach to questioning the problem that allows us to cross opinions with real practice of both teachers and students. This makes our work original. This first exploratory study is the beginning of an ambitious research project. Following the first stage that was limited to a specifically targeted audience, we are extending our study in the coming months to other profiles and actors working in other contexts: large student population cohorts, Master students, other disciplines. Strasbourg University is a part of the European Grouping of Cross-border Cooperation (EGCC) “Eucor – European campus” that unites five universities of the Upper Rhine and the EPICUR Alliance with its eight universities. It, thus, has access to international partnership that can be involved in a study of the SD education on a larger scale. On the local level, we will pursue a deeper study of teaching practices and their effects on student learning in the framework of the action research: which pedagogical practices do teachers prefer? How do these practices relate to the competence-based approach? Do they relate to the programme-based approach? What are the effects on the development of students’ competences?

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