Fostering Sustainability Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behaviours through a Tutor-Supported Interdisciplinary Course in Education for Sustainable Development

Abstract

Extant research into the efficacy of—especially interdisciplinary—higher education for sustainable development (HESD) is limited. A need exists to investigate students’ development of sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. Furthermore, universities have experienced difficulties implementing interdisciplinary HESD because of organisational barriers due to monodisciplinary structures, as well as educators’ and students’ reservations. This study introduces an interdisciplinary approach to HESD and investigates its efficacy regarding students’ development of sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours at a university in Germany. The approach applies a series of lectures by different sustainability experts accompanied by several tutorials that support students’ interdisciplinary learning and teamwork towards an interdisciplinary sustainability product. Tutors were trained in interdisciplinary teaching methods, as well as interdisciplinary communication and conflict management, beforehand. Before participating in the interdisciplinary course, the students had a moderate level of sustainability knowledge and behaviour, and a high level of sustainability attitudes. The results from the pre–post-test analysis indicate an increase in students’ sustainability knowledge and behaviours, and no change in students’ sustainability attitudes. If typical barriers to interdisciplinarity are mitigated, interdisciplinary HESD can facilitate students’ development.

Sustainable Economic Development Education: The Use of Artificial Neural Networks for the Profile Estimation of Students from Developing Countries

“…These results have followed the trends observed in other studies [7,17,44]. Thus, the positive attitudes of students can determine their intentions and behaviours towards sustainable development [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

“…The techniques used to obtain the results of the study show that the students of this research have positive perceptions towards the knowledge, attitudes, behaviours, and intentions of participating in sustainable development. These positive perceptions can increase the development of sustainable behaviours [24,31,38,44].…”

“…Attitude is the composition of beliefs, values, and feelings [29]. Emotions and attitudes can affect students' perceptions of their behaviour regarding sustainability [30,31]. People's attitudes towards sustainability can be attributed to participation in environmental organisations [32].…”

“…According to Çimer and Aydin [33], the development of individuals' attitudes towards sustainability influences their intentions and sustainable behaviours. Therefore, individual sustainable attitudes affect the intention to participate in actions related to sustainable development [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. A person with sustainable attitudes can help motivate one or more people to do so [35].…”

Teaching Digital Sustainability in Higher Education from a Transdisciplinary Perspective

“…Continuing in the field of sustainable student behaviours, Braßler and Sprengler [34] introduced in their study an interdisciplinary approach towards higher education for sustainable development (HESD) in the context of a German university. They focussed on the observing of arising attitudes and behaviour of students during their journey of acquiring knowledge in the field of sustainability.…”