A teaching strategy based on active learning which promotes strong sustainability that empowers students to have a different type of relationship with the environment

Abstract

Some human activities have caused a serious environmental crisis, producing irreversible damage and loss of resources and diversity, which is why a strong sustainability approach is required to keep human activities within planetary boundaries. However, a strong sustainability concept can be difficult for teachers to convey and for students to grasp, because it has few practical examples and applying it seems utopian. This article presents a teaching strategy of active learning for teaching strong sustainability at the university level and evaluates its usefulness for empowering students for another type of relationship with the environment. The teaching strategy is supported by a pedagogy that promotes critical thinking and recognizes learning as a way of questioning and empowering oneself. The teaching strategy was successfully applied in three university subjects that promote environmental education. Based on an online questionnaire to enrolled students (N = 87; 46F, 41M), the perspective of the teacher and the critical-thinking of authors, it was demonstrated that the teaching strategy allowed the strong sustainability concept to be appropriated by students of different disciplines, and demonstrated the feasibility of its practical application. Finally, the teaching strategy can be useful for teaching several disciplines, for curricular integration, and for promoting societal changes to achieve sustainability.

Keywords:

• Active learning
• strong sustainability
• planetary boundaries
• critical awareness
• curricular integration
• environmental education

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Correction Statement

Carlos Alberto Molina-Gómez is now affiliated to Universidad del Quindío, Facultad de Filosofía, Armenia, Colombia.

Notes

1 The teacher should clarify that in general, 20 hectares of forest would include more than 2000 trees and that this figure was proposed to facilitate calculations. Likewise, while students are free to consider the presence of rivers and lakes in a forest in any ecosystem, the description of the fauna and flora should be consistent with that ecosystem.

2 It is worth noticing that human capital (Kh) and other forms of capital (Kni) are constant and can be depreciated from the analysis when considering the same society at the same time.

3 Applying the teaching strategy in courses with more than 25 students reduces the possibility of giving feedback to the groups and carrying out personalized monitoring of student learning. Therefore, it is advisable to form a maximum of 5-6 groups of 4-5 students to facilitate the ideation of alternatives. Likewise, presenting proposals in the business conference can become impractical with many groups because some groups may not be creative when preparing the elevator pitch and several groups may present similar initiatives, such as forest reserves, which can make the activity monotonous.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by Universidad del Valle [Proyecto CI 9048, 2019].