Higher education teachers’ conceptions of sustainable development: implications for interdisciplinary pluralistic teaching

Abstract

An interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach to teaching and learning has been proposed as one solution to the lack of a consensus definition of sustainable development (SD). For teachers, such an approach requires an awareness of the interconnections among different dimensions of SD and their underlying value-based assumptions. In this article, we investigate whether higher education teachers’ conceptions of SD are consistent with these aims. We present the results of our interviews with five university teachers who are experienced in interdisciplinary SD in Finland. Our findings show that despite the teachers’ rich conceptions of cultural sustainability, including a variety of topics, concepts and value questions, their understanding of economic sustainability is rather limited and sketchy. We suggest that universities support the teachers’ social and peer learning based on reflections on unclear concepts and emerging SD ideas.

Keywords:

• Sustainable development
• teaching
• higher education
• interdisciplinary
• pluralism

Acknowledgements

We thank the interviewees for their time and cooperation, Erkki Olkinuora and Juulia Räikkönen for their valuable advice, and the anonymous referees for their insightful and helpful comments throughout the process of writing and revising this article. We also express our gratitude to the Kone Foundation for supporting this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This work was supported by the Kone Foundation, with a research grant for Henna Rouhiainen.

Notes

1 The organisations included were Helsinki Humane Society HESY; Finnish Association for Nature Conservation; Finnish Federation for Animal Welfare Associations SEY; Finnish Nature League; Friends of the Earth Finland; and World Wide Fund for Nature Finland.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henna Rouhiainen

Henna Rouhiainen (MSc in biology) is a PhD student in environmental sciences at the University of Turku, Finland. She is interested in a wide array of topics related to environmental and sustainable development education (EE/ESD), including the effect of values and ideologies on EE/ESD and the role of EE/ESD in development cooperation.

Timo Vuorisalo

Since 1992, Timo Vuorisalo has held the positions of an adjunct professor and a senior lecturer in environmental science at the University of Turku, Finland, where he earned his PhD degree in ecological zoology in 1989. In 1989–1990, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, and before that, he worked as a research assistant in the Academy of Finland. He has written several papers on evolutionary ecology, environmental history and urban ecology.