Authors: Siara Isaac; Valentina Rossi; Joelyn de Lima.
Topic: Transversal skills that promote sustainability.
Tool type: Teaching (Experiential learning activity guide).
Relevant disciplines: Any.
Keywords: Negotiation Skills; Perspective taking; Role-play.
Sustainability competency: Systems thinking; Critical thinking.
Related SDGs: SDG 4 (Quality education); SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy); SDG 9 (Industry innovation and infrastructure); SDG 12 (Responsible consumption and production); SDG 13 (Climate action).
Reimagined Degree Map Intervention: Active Pedagogies and Mindset Development; More Real-World Complexity; Cross-Disciplinarity.
Who is this article for?: This article should be read by educators at all levels of higher education looking to embed and integrate ESD into curriculum, module, and / or programme design.
Link to resource: How to support students to develop skills that promote sustainability
Learning and teaching notes:
This experiential activity aims to incorporate sustainability reflections into students’ group work. It uses a selection of materials with different properties to engage participants in building a wind turbine prototype based on a contextualised negotiation of multiple facets of sustainability.
Taking a disciplinary standpoint, participants first assume one of four engineering roles to identify specific sustainability priorities based on their role’s responsibilities and expertise. Next, they represent the perspective of their assigned role in an interdisciplinary group to optimise sustainability in the design of a wind turbine.
Throughout the activity, students are given targeted and short theoretical input on a selection of transversal skills that facilitate the integration of sustainability in group work: systems thinking, negotiation skills and perspective taking.
This activity guide provides the outline and material to assist the facilitator to prepare, and the slides and handouts for teaching the activity in approximately 75min. It can be facilitated with tangible objects (e.g. LEGO) as well as online. We invite you to adapt this activity to your context and tangibles availability.
Click here to access the activity guide
Supporting resources on the development of transversal skills:
https://zenodo.org/communities/3tplay/records
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Any views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are solely that of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of the Engineering Professors’ Council or the Toolkit sponsors and supporters.
