AN EXPERIENCE IN COLLABORATIVE WORKING AT CLASS: THE CASE OF THE SUBJECT “SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS”

Higher education institutions all around the European Union are experiencing an important change: a convergence process intending to optimize the education quality as well as adopting a comparable system for degrees. With this, university careers try to prepare competent professionals in their corresponding working field. These professionals not only must possess their proper knowledge (they are supposed to have acquired the expected competences) but they must also be able to get adapted to the social & work market requirements. They must also have a critical view of the reality and work in a collaborative way to improve their results… and this group of transversal and general competences must be trained in every subject in every degree.
Moved by this, we accepted the challenge of integrating the development of certain generic competitions in the traditional way of working at class that is basically centred on the transmission of knowledge.
In this line, the paper we present describes the experience developed in the subject “Sustainable Development and Environmental Ethics”. This is a 6 credits free elective subject given in the ETSID (former Technical Industrial Engineering School of Valencia) in the Polytechnic University of Valencia. This subject is focused in the Technical Industrial Engineering degree but it is also chosen by students that come from several engineering degrees. This subject chases to be a window to the state of the natural environment as well as an element to students’ ecological sensitization. In addition, this subject also tries to convince them about the need of an appropriate sustainable development and the importance of individual ethical coherent behaviour with nature. In order to get it, this subject aims to give to the students a wide range of environmental knowledge. This is fundamental to be able to develop an appropriate ethical code in their professional behavior when they finish the studies and they begin working. In this way, this subject is making efforts to make their jobs coherent with the environment.
Considering the nature of this subject, it is not difficult to train some transversal competences along the semester and this is what we made with students’ collaborative working at class. In this way, we get a real and active students’ participation and we successfully develop a series of social skills that wouldn’t be trained with the traditional lessons based on the teacher speeches. E.g.: Sensitization with the others needs, problems and expectations, adjusting personal ways of working to the collaborative working requirements, solving problems all together, empathy, living together with diverse and heterogeneous people, tolerance, flexibility, creativity, responsibility, initiative…