COMPETENCES FOR SUSTAINABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The principal aim of the Decade of the Education for the Sustainable Development (ESD) is to integrate the values inherent in the sustainable development in all the aspects of the education to foment changes in the behaviour that they facilitate the most sustainable attainment of a society.

The assessment of generic competences is pivotal within the framework of the new bachelor studies in technology. The UPC Barcelona Tech have been working in including competences in their education since 2005 with its Sustainable plans and it has established a compulsory competence in Sustainability and Social Commitment for all graduates from Barcelona Tech.

To evaluate competences in sustainability and social commitment in technology bachelor studies is necessary to know what should be evaluated. In this context, the goal of this document is to compare and find commonalities between different proposals of sustainability competences in higher education.

One of these approaches is the study from Cortes and Segalas Sustainability Competences in Catalan University Degrees, which presents a diagnosis on which competences for sustainability have been integrated into the new degrees developed under the Bologna process at Catalan universities. This work maps de competences in sustainability and compares their integration in different areas of knowledge.

Another relevant work analysed is the key competencies in sustainability presented by Wiek et all, which is a compilation which indicates a rich picture of key competencies in sustainability. Here the goal of academic sustainability programs is to enable students to plan, conduct, and engage in sustainability research and problem solving based on the interplay of systems-thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic, and interpersonal competencies. According to this framework, the author characterizes each of the competencies in short profiles based on the literature review and complementing arguments.

Finally the work from Roorda, The Odyssey to Sustainability of the Universities of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands is analysed. Here the author presents a checklist in order to investigate the level to which study programs meet the demands of ESD. The list contains general characteristics, and no discipline related subjects, as these vary with each discipline in higher education.