Do We Teach What We Preach? An International Comparison of Problem- and Project-Based Learning Courses in Sustainability

Abstract

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 Role of Transacademic Interface Managers in Transformational Sustainability Research and Education

“…To achieve the ambitious goal of facilitating a collaborative process that yields solutions to sustainability problems, TIM adopts various roles of a facilitator, mediator, translator, and process innovator. However, the literature offers little with respect to educational opportunities in sustainability research projects, or the education of TIMs-despite the increasing number of sustainability projects that integrate research and teaching [5,7,38]. Also, there is little practice-oriented guidance articulating when TIM is doing what along the lifecycle of a project.…”

“…As stated earlier, in this article, we go beyond the basic format of transacademic or participatory sustainability research and highlight transacademic research that actively involves students and therefore provides a unique educational setting [6,7,23]. We focus on the role of TIMs in such transacademic sustainability research and education projects, with special attention to the requirements that stem from the educational settings.…”

“…While this is widely considered -best practice‖, it often presents a challenge to scholars at universities, as they lack capacity and time needed for negotiating different agendas, languages, competencies, and cultures among faculty, students, and stakeholders [6,7].…”

“…As different communities of scholars and professionals have made significant progress in transacademic interface management over the past 15 years, there are quite rich experiences available that can inform the professional practice of the TIM. The compilation of TIM's tasks, capacities, and training opportunities presented in this article is based on a variety of sources: literature reviews (Section 2); research on the role of TIMs in sustainability research projects with educational opportunities at six universities [7]; and the authors' experiences from working in such projects at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and Arizona State University over the last 10 years, e.g., [2,4,6,13,23]. This synthesis article is intended to support universities in organizing participatory sustainability research and education more effectively and to offer students an additional career perspective.…”

“…There is little detail available on the role of the facilitator in this process, who serves as a transacademic interface manager (TIM). We have coined this term [6,7] in reference to the early concept of -transacademic‖ research in which scholars and stakeholders collaboratively conduct research, co-producing evidence [19]. The terms -transacademic‖ or -participatory‖ research are used interchangeable in this article, and do in fact represent a wider cluster of converging paradigms, including collaborative, phronetic, post-normal, issue-driven interdisciplinary, Mode-2, and transdisciplinary research [4,5,11,[20][21][22].…”