Students’ perspectives of alignment between teaching-learning methods and the promotion of social innovation competencies

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes students’ perceptions of how teaching-learning methods influence the promotion of higher education students’ social innovation competencies based on a sustainability framework. We focus our analysis on Spain using ‘Spanish Universities Involvement in Social Innovation Activities’ (SUISIA) data, collected in 2021. For the long list of 19 competencies available in our sample of 349 students, we identify those competencies associated with social innovation and categorize them as organizational, entrepreneurial and collaborative. We then employ different statistical models to identify which teaching-learning methods facilitate the development of social innovation competencies. We also consider variables such as student characteristics and field of study program. Our results suggest a lack of implementation of active teaching-learning approaches which leads to poor development of organizational, entrepreneurial and collaborative competencies, particularly in engineering studies in comparison to other disciplines. This suggests a gap between higher education and society’s demands in students’ preparation for and engagement in a complex and dynamic future aimed at achieving the sustainable development goals outlined in Agenda 2030.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• sustainability
• social innovation
• teaching-learning methods
• competencies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the National R&D Program of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, grant number RTI2018-101722-B-I00 Spanish Universities Involvement in Social Innovation Activities (SUISIA). The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily the views of that organization.