Humanities and Social Sciences in Relation to Sustainable Development Goals and STEM Education

Abstract

This article explores the question: How can the humanities and social sciences become key elements for the implementation of quality STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, providing students with the competencies required for a sustainable development agenda? To answer this question, the article seeks to (1) understand the elements that are common in STEM education, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, (2) analyze these relationships in higher education, and (3) evaluate how to integrate them in a classroom. The article presents the experience of a course that explicitly seeks to integrate humanities and social sciences in a STEM-oriented institution of higher education. This discussion will be complemented by the analysis of survey data from two semesters, taken at the beginning and at the end of a course. This will help to discuss how the students shaped their perceptions about these topics and to what extent these perceptions were or were not changed by the course. Finally, the article proposes that the specific analysis of sustainable development goals (SDGs) and their targets are educational tools to help achieve interdisciplinarity in the classroom, but only if we help the students to see the relationship of these SDGs to their own lives and with their own careers.

Connecting chemical worlds for a sustainable future

“…30 Small changes, per se , sometimes seem easy to dismiss and futile; however, social studies have proven that communities could catalyse a transition towards a more sustainable future. 31 “No one is too small to make a difference,” the title of Greta Thunberg's book, perfectly summarises this idea. Similarly, connections and community building with other disciplines and the broader society help integrate aspects such as cultural competence and social justice into the discussion, which helps challenge the establishment and accelerate change.…”

STEAM Matters for Sustainability

“…In order to tackle this climate-change disconnect, some authors have called for an artistic turn in sustainability science (Kagan, 2017;Heras et al, 2021), arguing that artistic research and artful learning can contribute to transdisciplinary knowledge building which is considered a cornerstone of sustainability progress. Yet, in spite of general consensus that sustainability, as a complex issue, should be addressed as a joint effort across disciplines, e.g., by integrating STEM with the arts, humanities, and social sciences (Marcone, 2022), how to effectively carry out transdisciplinary collaborations as well as how to integrate diverse knowledge fields and, importantly, what the results of this integration could be, remain hard to discover (Sellberg et al, 2021;Pohl et al, 2020Pohl et al, , 2021.…”

Entire issue

“…In order to tackle this climate-change disconnect, some authors have called for an artistic turn in sustainability science (Kagan, 2017;Heras et al, 2021), arguing that artistic research and artful learning can contribute to transdisciplinary knowledge building which is considered a cornerstone of sustainability progress. Yet, in spite of general consensus that sustainability, as a complex issue, should be addressed as a joint effort across disciplines, e.g., by integrating STEM with the arts, humanities, and social sciences (Marcone, 2022), how to effectively carry out transdisciplinary collaborations as well as how to integrate diverse knowledge fields and, importantly, what the results of this integration could be, remain hard to discover (Sellberg et al, 2021;Pohl et al, 2020Pohl et al, , 2021.…”