Pedagogical Approaches for Sustainable Development in Building in Higher Education

Abstract

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is one of the great challenges that university faculties have to face. Therefore, a multidisciplinary team from the faculty of Engineering of Gipuzkoa (EIG) at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has developed pedagogical approaches to apply in construction degrees, namely Civil Engineering and Technical Architecture. Pedagogical tools, such as problem-based learning (PBL) or research-based learning (RBL), and environmental tools, such as the life cycle assessment (LCA) and computational thinking (CT), have been used; in doing so, they acquire a sustainable approach to work “soft-skills” competencies into sustainability. For example, research-based tools have helped to revalorize waste both outside and inside the university; they have contributed to more sustainable industrial processes, collaborative research projects, and participation in conferences and scientific publications. Based on academic results, the designed tools are appropriate for teaching in Technical Architecture and Civil Engineering degrees; however, to demonstrate their potential in terms of sustainable education, holistic rubrics based on in-depth quantitative educational research are required. Thus, to analyze the ability of the students to incorporate sustainability principles in their work, the multidisciplinary team presenting this paper plans to collaborate with psychologists and sociologists within the framework of the Bizia-Lab program of the UPV/EHU.

Education for sustainable development through research-based learning in an online environment

“…There seems to be a more qualitative tendency in the evaluation of RBL in learning environments or the subject orientations do not suit the current research question. Due to the specificity of the objective, there is limited use of validated or even exploratory approaches on survey instruments (for instance, exploratory-oriented Espinoza-Figueroa et al , 2021, other subject-related specification Gao et al , 2020 or use case-orientated Martín-Garin et al , 2021). Instead, the preliminary development of the survey instrument is guided by Bühner’s (2011) top-down approach to be able to translate the specificity of the present research objective into empirical quantities.…”