KEKKO: Sustainability from higher education to practice

The KEKKO project investigates how different actors views on sustainability and sustainability action emerge during higher education studies.

Complex, interconnected eco-social crises create a setting that highlights the need for sustainability competences and sustainability action. Higher education institutions have answered to the increased need for sustainability competences by developing crossdisciplinary sustainability teaching and study programmes concentrating on sustainability as well as by integrating sustainability goals in their other teaching. However, with the sustainability discourse spreading to new contexts, the already originally broad concept of sustainability has gained new, sometimes ambiguous meanings. The views on sustainability and sustainability action affect on what kind of sustainability individuals aim for and how they do this and how they think about sustainability actions. The diversity of sustainability views can both disturb and advance organizing sustainability education. Therefore, evaluating the success of sustainability education requires understanding on how and why the views that students, teachers and business collaborators have on sustainability and sustainability actions change during the education.

The KEKKO project explores the views that the students, teachers and business collaborators from different fields have on sustainability and sustainability action and how these views change during higher-education studies that emphasize sustainability. We recognise concepts and narratives that actors related to the study programmes use to articulate their views, investigate to what extent the actors share common views on sustainability and sustainability action and study how the social relationships between actors explain the emergence of the views. In particular, we pay attention on how the views change during the study programmes and when the students graduate and move to work life.

The views on sustainability and sustainability action often include the idea of a change or a need for one in the present courses of action. Therefore, these views are typically described with narratives that combine different concepts, phenomena and actors into temporal and causal structures. Particularly suitable for evaluating sustainability education is the theory of master and counter narratives: the material produced by the educational institution, for example curricula and course materials, reflect the master narrative that dominates the sustainability discussion within the study programme, while the students can during their studies either adopt this master narrative or develop counter narratives to challenge it.

Onerva Korhonen (onerva.korhonen [at] tuni.fi)