Sustainability in higher education: A needs assessment on a course “Education and awareness for sustainability”

This needs assessment (NA) study was undertaken with 85 undergraduate students from various departments to assess their needs and expectation from the course “Education and Awareness for Sustainability,” which introduces the terms of education, awareness and sustainability together. The NA was an initial step of course evaluation assessing the total quality of course implementation. Students’ expectations from the course varied according to their subjects and departments, and their needs were more based on their life habits and professional orientations. The students believed in a strong association among the terms of education, awareness and sustainability. Their definitions of these terms referred that sustainability could not be fully understood and realized without education and awareness of the natural environment. The significant role of education for sustainability was initially stressed in Brundtlant Report (1987), one of the attempts to identify education-sustainable development relationship. In this regard, education plays a crucially important role for motivating people to show more sustainable lifestyle and behave more sustainable, and also to help communities understand the principles of sustainable development. Ciegis and Gineitienè (2006) claimed that higher education institutions, particularly universities, have a leadership role for teaching, learning and research on sustainability and should rise to meet the challenges of sustainable development in the society. Furthermore, in order to realize this role, the universities should integrate the sustainability issues in their programs (Cortese, 1999) through considering multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches (Martins, Mata, & Costa, 2006) since sustainability is regarded with several other subjects, i.e. technical and scientific areas (Crofton, 2000). The course Education and Awareness for Sustainability in the curriculum of Science Education Department in METU is one good example of this integration. Dissemination of this integration into other universities may take time. As discussed by Velazquez, Munguia and Sanchez (2005), education for sustainable development is a continuous process which will take place in the agenda of many universities, but this process may not be as quick as possible due to insufficient conditions of campuses.

The students in the study identified the terms of education, awareness and sustainability and interactions among these concepts, as well as their expectations from the course and the course instructor. In addition, desired instructional methods and techniques, materials and equipment and evaluation procedures were also indicated by the students. Most of the students’ main purpose for enrolling in this course was to learn how to integrate a sustainable way of life into their profession as well as daily life. It is interesting and encouraging to find out that they felt a need to learn how to be a partner in realizing the sustainable development and they were aware of their responsibility as future educators, engineers or decision makers. Nearly all of them indicated that they would like to learn how to deal with environmental problems, how to develop environmentally responsible behaviors, how to teach the environmental issues and problems to their students, and how to inform the individuals about the environment. This is evidence that the students would like to come up with their own solutions for a sustainable way of life and integrate this notion into their life experiences. This course, in this sense, could be a mean to link between theory and practice, and also serve as a bridge between the classroom and real life experiences. When students’ needs are more integrated in course content and implementation, the possibility to realize this link will be more likely to increase.

The results basically proved that the more the students’ needs are integrated into the course implementation, the more the students feel attached to the course and the more they feel responsible for their own learning process. As far as students’ expectation regarding course implementation was concerned, it was observed that they described a constructive learning environment. They reported an active role of students and a guiding role of teachers in the class activities. Based upon the students’ responses, it can be recognized that the best instructional methods to increase the awareness for sustainability were discussion and brainstorming; the best instructional materials were computer and projection machines, visual materials – i.e. posters, video and TV; and the best evaluation methods were teacher-evaluation, self-evaluation and product-oriented evaluation methods. Using different types of instructional methods and techniques, and also instructional media, can help the students look at the concept of sustainability from different point of view. The method of discussion and brainstorming were required to be frequently used within the class activities. Both of these methods encourage high level participation in class activities and require higher order thinking skills (Ornstein & Lasley, 2004). This can be tied to students’ willingness to share their own ideas with their peers and to come up with common solutions for a sustainable way of life. Furthermore, the students required the instructor to use visual equipment (i.e., computer, video) to be aware of the example of environmental problems and issues encountered in local and global communities. It is well known that using a variety of visual material in course implementation can enhance the learning and make it long lasting (Demirel, 1995; Kaya & Demirel, 2000). In addition, students would like to be evaluated through the methods of teacher evaluation, self-evaluation and product-oriented evaluation. This result showed that the students would like to be evaluated based on their products, and not only teacher judgment, but also their own judgments on their products are valued. Peer evaluation, portfolio evaluation and other methods were not that much appreciated. Encouraging students to be responsible of their own products through evaluation can contribute to both the instructor and the students. For example, students can see their learning difficulties and monitor their own progress. Furthermore, the possibility to make fair judgments by teacher can increase through self-evaluation (i.e., reflections) and teacher evaluation will almost complement each other.