Student Team Sustainability Research Projects as an Approach to Education for Sustainability at the University Level
Authors: Ceulemans G. , Dewulf B. , D’hollander J. , Fedorowicz F. M. , Kempeneers J. , Muylaert K. , Obad Aghandum E. , Vandamme D. , Peirs T. , Philips E. , Smeesters V. , Van Hooreweghe F. , Vermeulen H. , Verswijvel V. , Volckaert F. , Vroom P.-J. , Severijns N. 
Published: January 2020

Abstract At this moment about 7.6 billion people inhabit the earth (Worldpopulation clock 2018). A sustainability revolution is necessary (WCED 1987, UNCED 1992, Rockström 2009) to avoid this huge population in striving for a luxury life depleting the resources of the
planet. There are also important social issues that need to be resolved (Raworth 2017). It has been argued that even a real cultural shift is needed (Kagan 2010).This revolution can be started in education (UN 2003). The decade of education for sustainable development <target target-type="page-num"
id="p-85"/>(UNESCO 2014a) ran from 2005 till 2014. It is being carried further in the Global Action Program (UNESCO 2014b). At the University of Leuven, the ‘Science and Sustainability’ course is a stand-alone elective course of 6 credits that specifically aims to provide master’s
students in the natural sciences with education for (the benefit of) sustainability action (Ceulemans & Severijns 2018a and 2018b). Last year (2016‐2017), the course ran for the first time and insight was gained in the competences that master’s level students hold for sustainability.
Based on this experience, stronger emphasis was placed in the second year (2017‐2018) on providing, and making students use, tools to approach sustainability issues. Specific attention was directed toward allowing students to get acquainted with systems thinking and deal with inter-
and transdisciplinary issues by approaching problems from a multi-stakeholder point of view. The sustainability reports the student teams compiled therefore necessarily included a representation of the system map they compiled to get a grip on the sustainability issue. Also a stakeholder map
needed to be drawn.Near the end of the course it became apparent that students had difficulty in deviating from the Western interpretation of sustainability, where ecological criteria strongly dominate and ecological responsible behavior is pretended to be adequate to drive the transformation
for true sustainability. However, it is in the socio-political and socio-cultural dimensions that the value-laden component of sustainability is really found. Several team-tailored feedback and discussion sessions were therefore organized to make students at least consider a slightly broader
view on sustainability.Three student reports of projects that were carried out within this framework are presented in the appendices to this abstract. Students were asked to focus in their reports specifically on the broader sustainability related issues. Technical and exact-scientific
information related to their project topic was preferably included in an addendum. Sustainability dimensions on which a focus was laid (e.g. Social, Cultural, Politics, Economics, Communications) varied among the projects, being largely dependent on the topic addressed and in part also on
the major stakeholders.