The world faces many challenges related to sustainability issues. This means that our current students must learn to apply their knowledge and skills to tomorrow's world. The question is how they can deal with these challenges and what they can contribute from their place to find a solution. The Higher Education for Sustainability project, led by Edwin van Meerkerk, aims to support students in this with a new didactic approach to sustainability education. In doing so, the project goes beyond setting up a specific subject or minor in each programme but will use a bottom-up approach to focus on implementing sustainability education within the existing curriculum of each programme.
The premise of this is that higher education should be more than the transfer of skills and knowledge but should also focus on the personal development of students. Students will be challenged to understand the complexity of sustainability issues from their specific backgrounds and gain insight into how their expertise can contribute to solutions in the future. This particular focus on personal development is also the starting point of the spearhead: by paying more attention to the meaning students give to these sustainability issues and by helping them to tolerate uncertainties, for example, by working with the Inner Development Goals, we make a positive contribution to the mission of Radboud University.
The team members of the sustainability spearhead are:
Daniela Becker, Danielle Bleize, Johan Kwisthout, Sandra Klaperski - van de Wal, Marthe Mosheuvel, Barbara Müller, Arnoud Oude Groote Beverborg, Rozalia Toth, Johanna van Schaik, Saskia van Schaik, Dorien Wellen