A Sustainability Educational System: From Pedagogy to Competencies

Abstract: Sustainability education (SE) is a transdisciplinary field. Diverse disciplines support behaviors that consider interrelationships among our environmental and social systems, including our educational systems. Educational systems are complex systems and should be considered as such to promote SE and to understand the nature of complexity and the learners themselves as living systems. One such example is higher education. Supporting SE in higher education involves considering all the components within the system, including the educator as they design their approach. Teaching pedagogy should be holistic and experiential to engage learners in different sustainability learning paradigms. Learning about sustainability content (learning about sustainability), putting learning into practice (learning for sustainability), and having a sustainability mindset (learning as sustainability) are all features of such a system. These learning paradigms and teaching approaches help to support the knowledge and skills necessary to build sustainability literacy. Along with defining these components of a SE system, consideration should be given to the competencies that support sustainability literacy. The sustainability teaching-learning system can be organized into categories of foundational sustainability competencies: intrapersonal, knowledge, skills, and behavioral. Connecting these competencies to sustainability content and concepts allows flexibility and emergent learning for educators and learners alike in higher education settings.