Assessment and Certification of Higher Education for Sustainable Development

Abstract

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Greening the Ivory Tower: A Review of Educational Research on Sustainability in Post-Secondary Education

“…The AISHE system has been used to assess sustainability education in a number of PSE institutions across Europe, while the AUA has been used to examine the uptake of sustainability in education, governance, research and community engagement within PSE institutions located in the Asia-Pacific region. In using AISHE, Roorda and Martens [64] notice that sustainability in education is best assessed within separate programs or departments of a given university, due to the methodological and developmental differences that exist between faculties within a university. They go on to note that this can make cross-curricular comparison of sustainability difficult, even within the same institution.…”

“…The researchers note businesses were better at tying efficiency policies to local sustainability initiatives in the communities they are embedded in, while critiquing some universities for viewing their non-profit status as a license to be inefficient with resources. Roorda and Martens [64] report that quality management tools developed by the business world and utilized by PSE institutions to assess environmental sustainability in Europe include tools developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). In comparing university auditing of sustainability practice for universities in New Zealand, Fisher [73] suggests that the ISO 14000 series of environmental standards would be useful for campuses commencing sustainability reviews.…”

Evaluation of sustainability using the AISHE Instrument: case study in a Brazilian University

“…These indexes, however, should be instruments orientated towards the particularities of the higher education institution, for example, the Graphical Assessment of Sustainability in Universities -GASU (Lozano, 2006), the Sustainability Tool for Auditing Universities Curricula in Higher Education -STAUNCH (Lozano, 2010), the Framework-Level-Actors -FLA Analysis (Ferrer-Balas, Buckland, Mingo, 2007) and the Auditing Instrument for Sustainability in Higher Education -AISHE (Roorda, 2001;2008). Shriberg (2002) presented in his article an outlook of the strengths and weaknesses of the assessment tool and concluded that it is necessary in the future to think about a universal assessment tool which can facilitate the ranking of universities in terms of levels of sustainability.…”

“…as a self-assessment tool (Roorda, 2004;2008). Every university is free to do so, as all necessary equipment, such as the AISHE book (Roorda, 2001) and the computer application ' AISHE Reporter', can simply be downloaded.…”

A Preliminary Model for Assessing University Sustainability from the Student Perspective

“…Assessing sustainable development requires that there is an accepted understanding of what this means for universities. One of the promising approaches mentioned by [6] is the Assessment Instrument of Sustainability in Higher Education (AISHE) that defines university sustainability using the modules of identity, operations, education, research and society [7][8][9][10]. The AISHE-model provides a proposed operationalization of sustainability that clearly states responsibilities within the core activities of education and research and also in work with society, while referring to the Brundtland commission definition and the Triple Bottom Line.…”