Session Information
10 SES 05.5 PS, General Poster Exhibition
General Poster Session during Lunch
Contribution
We consider that the introduction of sustainability competences into the curriculum can be a powerful tool to help university students’ training contemplate the contents required to provide them capacities so they undertake their professional activities based on ethical criteria relating to sustainable development responsibility. As Geli reports, sustainability implies a wide range of knowledge and skills for action that goes beyond the division of knowing, and which also requires didactic treatment from ethical reasonability criteria; this involves including eco-ethics in future education. The university is an especially relevant, potential dynamical agent of change towards sustainability as it trains future professionals who, when at work, will have a direct or indirect effect on their surroundings. The global nature and depth of the sustainable challenge needs everyone to participate, particularly those people who will make decisions in the future. Businesspeople, scientists, lawyers, teachers, philosophers, etc., are all needed to provide solutions to sustainability-related problems in their work posts and in their competences framework.
Along these lines, the motivation of our research work is based on three basic assumptions:
a) Interdisciplinary: our research group is made up of researchers from different academic areas who contribute diverse academic approaches and cultures that facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues from the logics of disciplinary approaches.
b) The “university/society”, “academic world/world of work” interaction. The university institution has to respond to the challenge that today’s society poses; for instance, preparing competent professionals to face their occupational activities from the sustainability viewpoint.
c) Scientific and ethical development. The intention is that research results provide new knowledge, strategies and attitudes about education for sustainability in the higher education setting.
All university students should be educated in their fields of specialization according to sustainable criteria and values to achieve sustainability. To go about this, universities will have to acquire a central comprehension of the sustainability view so that students can consider this perspective in their future professional skills. This research project answered this question by surveying teachers’ attitudes at the Teaching School in the University of Valencia, where they are trained in the Early Childhood Education Teacher Degree and the Primary Education Teacher Degree.
The specific objectives are analyse the normative context of sustainability training in new programmes of studies for the Early Childhood Education Teachers degree and Primary Education Teachers degree and review references on the sustainability-related competences included in the new programmes of studies.
And for that we begin studying the teachers’ preconceptions and attitudes about the introduction of sustainability into the mentioned degrees. To know the reality of the target study, a questionnaire has been used with the teachers of both degrees and some results are presented in this paper.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
1. Geli, A. M., Universidad, sostenibilidad y ambientalización curricular. In Ambientalización Curricular en los Estudios Superiores. Arbat. E. and Geli, A.M. eds. I. Aspectos Ambientales de las Universidades. (Universitat de Girona. Servei de Publicacions and Red ACES. Girona). 2002 2. Orr, D. Unresolved questions in environmental education. In State of the World 2010. Transforming cultures from consumerism to sustainability, ed. L. Starke and L. Mastny, pp 75–82. Washington, DC: The World Watch Institute, 2010 3. Novo, M. El desarrollo sostenible: su dimensión ambiental y educativa. Ma¬drid: UNESCO/Pearson. 2006 4. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). 2005. United Nations decade of education for sustainable development (2005–2014): International implementation scheme (ED/DESD/2005/PI/01), Paris: UNESCO, 2005 5. Pramling, I and Kaga, Y., Early Childhood Education for transform cultures for Sustainability. In State of the World 2010. Transforming cultures from consumerism to sustainability, ed. L. Starke and L. Mastny, pp 57-61. Washington, DC: The World Watch Institute, 2010 6. Aznar Minguet, P., Martinez-Agut, M. P., Palacios, B., Piñero, A. and Ull, M. A., Introducing sustainability into university curricula: an indicator and baseline survey of the views of university teachers at the University of Valencia. Environmental Education Research, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp 145-166, 2011. 7. Sibbel, A., Pathways towards sustainability through higher education. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education Vol. 10, No. 1,pp 68–82, 2009. 8. Barth, M., J. Godemann, M. Rieckmann, and U. Stoltenberg. Developing key competencies for sustainable development in higher education. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp 416–30, 2007. 9. Lozano, R. Incorporation and institutionalization of sustainable development into universities: Breaking through barriers to change. Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 14, Nos. 9–11, pp 787– 96, 2006.
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