Designing Learning for Sustainable Development: Digital Practices as Boundary Crossers and Predictors of Sustainable Lifestyles

Abstract

Sustainable development (SD) is a multidimensional issue. However, research findings report a divide between students' awareness and behavior. It is identified that study programs are designed more for awareness outcomes, and not so much for behavioral outcomes. For higher-order learning outcomes manifested in a sustainable development behavior, the authors argue for a model based on an understanding of learning as boundary crossing. Based on this model, learning for sustainable development occurs in relating social practices, lifestyles, academic practices, professional practices, and students' digital practices. To inform teachers' approaches to teaching as an important driver of institutional change, we conducted a survey among students of urban and spatial planning in Slovenia. Examined factors included personal, academic, and digital predictors for sustainable development awareness, lifestyle, and behavioral intention. We hypothesized that a significant predictor for sustainable development behavior, which was measured as sustainable lifestyle and sustainable development behavioral intention, would be learning in social practices, and that learning in social practices would predict preferred teaching methods. The findings of hierarchical regression analysis indicated personal factors as the most important predictors of SD behavioral intention, and academic predictors as the most important factors for SD awareness. Digital practices were found to be the most important predictors of a sustainable lifestyle. Social practices of sustainable lifestyle, digital practices, and perceived teaching methods predicted students' preferred teaching methods. We discuss the future directions of sustainable development education, considering digital social media practices as essential boundary crossers.

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“…On the other hand, a majority of the respondents were moderately satisfied with the sustainable development content of their studies, with the ones whose current or former job has a connection to sustainability being slightly more satisfied. As also noted by Starcic et al [14], our results suggest that sustainable development themes should be contextualized and applied in practice in order to improve learning outcomes.…”

“…While university students consider sustainability and sustainable development generally as an important and positive concept, they also seem to have incomplete knowledge of the matter [10,11]. Engineering students often connect sustainable development with environmental issues and do not link social aspects as strongly to sustainability [11][12][13][14]. As a result, university teachers have a crucial role in integrating sustainability-related knowledge and skills within courses and curricula.…”

“…Awareness of sustainable development is not necessarily reflected in behaviour [14]. Including sustainability in higher education curricula is thus not enough; studied knowledge and skills need to be transferred to actual working life practices.…”

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“…Technology-supported learning environments facilitate critical thinking, collaboration skills (Jääskelä et al, 2017), and creativity (Idris & Nor, 2010;Loveless et al, 2003;Sang et al, 2010). Such learning environments also could reduce the divide between academic and professional behaviors in real-life contexts (Istenič Starčič et al, 2018).…”

“…Teaching and learning should engage students in authentic technology practices such as social network practices, which parallel students' authentic social practices (Istenič Starčič et al, 2018). Collaboration and online sharing behaviors also support vicarious learning (Bandura, 1986;Schunk, 2012), which could contribute to technology adoption (Adams Becker et al, 2017) into other spheres of their lives and enhance their beliefs about technology integrated into learning and teaching.…”