Analysis of the presence of sustainability in Higher Education Degrees of the Spanish university system

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the extent to which sustainability is present in the curricula of the 16 Education Degree programs belonging to the EDINSOST project: 6 Early Childhood Education Degrees, 7 Primary Education Degrees, 2 Pedagogy Degrees and 1 Social Education Degree. The results obtained suggest that sustainability is present in all Degrees, but not uniformly so. A great disparity is observed in the number of subjects that develop sustainability, with an average of 22.63 subjects per Degree. The competency most present is the ‘Application of ethical principles related to the values of sustainability in personal and professional behaviors,’ while the least present is ‘Sustainable use of resources and prevention of negative impacts on the natural and social environment.’ Sustainability is not developed uniformly in the different universities either. Three universities (UAM, UCA and UIC) develop sustainability competencies at 100%, while others such as the USAL do so at only 50%.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• competencies in sustainability
• Sustainable Development Goals
• Sustainability Competency Map
• education for sustainable development
• Higher Education Degrees

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the rest of the EDINSOST team for their collaboration in this work, especially Francisco M. Moreno-Pino, Bárbara Sureda, Miguel Antúnez and Ibon Gutiérrez.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although the concept of Sustainable Development is broader than the concept of sustainability, from now on we will use the word sustainability for coherence with the rest of the documentation referenced in the text.

2 A subject is a module of knowledge that has a certain number of credits and that is part of an academic curriculum.

3 CRUE refers to the Conference of Presidents of Spanish Universities.

4 All degrees in Spain are subject to a verification process before being authorized. The documentation corresponding to this process is presented in a document called ‘Verifica’ through a software application with the same name.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness [grant number EDU2015-65574-R].