Education is at the core of our university and is arguably the most direct pathway to creating a positive social impact towards a just and sustainable world. Integrating sustainability into our educational framework means teaching students to understand and appreciate the interconnectedness of economic, social and environmental factors. Our aim is to equip our students with the knowledge and skills to address sustainability challenges in their future careers. Achieving this goal also requires engaging and educating our lecturers. As we aspire to contribute to addressing sustainability challenges, we must transform the way we teach and learn.
During the EUR Sustainability Dialogues in 2023, it became clear that embedding sustainability in all existing courses and programmes is a priority. The participants from the EUR community want to see transformative education that enables our students to work effectively in a disruptively changing society. This is why our chosen goals are to strengthen the mainstreaming, literacy and accessibility of sustainability education.
Facts and figures
Goal: offer a wide range of minors, majors and specialisations with a sustainability focus
EUR currently boasts 106 degree and non-degree programmes related to sustainability, including honours programmes, professional programmes and open online courses (MOOCs). Our website provides an overview of sustainability-related courses and programmes. Our method for identifying sustainability-related courses and programmes was updated this year, which partly explains the significant increase in the number of courses and programmes compared to last year.
Figure 2.1 Facts and figures about courses and programmes in 2023
Highlights and achievements
The new master programme in Societal Transitions, co-produced by the DIT platform, the Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil) and DRIFT, welcomed its first cohort of students in 2023. Through this programme, we aim to teach students to interpret, develop and facilitate sustainability transitions. Students learn about interdisciplinary knowledge, drawing upon the expertise of several of EUR’s leading schools.
Students who choose the new minor Action Education for Social Change & Sustainability can learn theoretical and practical tools to make teaching transformative and sustainable. EUR students rated the first edition as one of the highest rated minors in the 2023–2024 academic year.
The Erasmus Hub! Rotterdam was officially opened in 2023. It is a new place for active and creative teaching with a focus on impact-driven education, working on solutions for sustainability-related issues and engagement with Rotterdam. The Hub! is an innovation programme founded by Impact at the Core.
Working together on social and sustainable issues
We can make an enormous impact through teaching, as our students learn how to deal with social and sustainability challenges.
The DIT platform organised a Summer School in 2023 for PhD students and academics titled Design and Transitions: Emerging Theories and Practices at the Intersection. The aim of the Summer School was to help members of the academic community unlock the potential of research to advance fair sustainability transitions.
In terms of practicing sustainability in teaching, a recent graduate, Aleksander Odziemkowski, won the Erasmus Thesis Awards 2023 for his master thesis about measuring sustainability: Seeing the forest, not just the trees: semantic analysis of ‘greenium’ in corporate green bonds. He completed the MSc in Business Analytics & Management programme at the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) in 2023.
For students who want to broaden their understanding of sustainability, the Erasmus Honours Academy offers three interdisciplinary honours programmes. In 2023, bachelor students could apply for the Grand Challenges programme, as part of which students organise learning experiences on urban regeneration, or for the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus (LDE) Sustainability programme, which challenges students to assist social partners in analysing sustainability issues and solutions. Dutch master students were able to join the new Inclusive Energy Transition programme, which focuses on ensuring all voices are heard regarding sustainability challenges. Due to the success of the Dutch track of the Inclusive Energy Transition programme, an English track is now being developed to begin in 2024–2025.
Through its Redefining the Classroom project, ErasmusX facilitates the co-creation of knowledge with partners from different educational disciplines, levels and cultural backgrounds and with social partners from Rotterdam. From its location in the HefHouse, it aims for learning in a real-world setting to bridge the gap between academia and the vibrant youth of south Rotterdam.
Goal: make sure every student has a basic level of sustainability literacy
Sustainability literacy is the understanding of root causes of persistent sustainability challenges and the need for diverse, critical, inclusive and explorative ways to engage with social change. Achieving high levels of sustainability literacy among students, professors and employees goes hand in hand with mainstreaming sustainability teaching.
Highlights and achievements
This year, an immersion workshop series on Climate & Ecological Literacy to Action was organised for employees and students. This workshop series provided insights and high-impact approaches to carbon emission reductions, biodiversity support and ecosystem harmonisation. The workshop had five two-hour sessions and 110 registered participants. Workshops like these are essential to understanding what and how we should teach to achieve sustainability literacy.
Improving the sustainability literacy of students also means our lecturers must adapt their teaching practices. Fourteen lecturers participated in a Transformative Education Learning Programme. The intention of this programme was twofold: (1) to unite lecturers around the central question of how to contribute to the transformation of society through transformative education, and (2) to create a space for inner development needed to renew the old system. It was a process-oriented intervention within the organisation and a stepping stone to catalyse transformation at our university together with EUR lecturers.
Professional employees at EUR can sign up for the Transition Academy organised by DRIFT. More than 600 professionals, including EUR employees, have already received post-academic transition teaching through the course. Graduates of the Transition Academy return to their (professional) setting with the capacity to think and act for radical change in their own (professional) environment, accelerating justice and sustainability transitions.
There’s no future for teaching if we teach as if tomorrow will be like yesterday. Everything will change: it’s an exciting opportunity to rise to this challenge.
Goal: mainstreaming – embed the concepts of sustainability and transformation in our entire portfolio of academic disciplines
Mainstreaming sustainability teaching means embedding the concepts of sustainability and transformation in our entire portfolio of academic disciplines. Students should inevitably encounter these concepts in their programmes without having to choose to learn about sustainability.
Highlights and achievements
EUR offers a wide range of courses and programmes related to sustainability (see the overview above). We hope to see the number of courses continue to increase across the faculties.
In 2023, the Sustainability Dialogues sparked fruitful discussions about the changes we want in education. The participants in the dialogues would like to move towards transformative education. This will require a shift from educating people within disciplinary boundaries to perform well within the existing social order, to educating students to work within a disruptively changing social context and across disciplines for structural change. The Executive Board will respond to the outcomes of the dialogues in Q2 2024 and indicate which actions will be taken.
Click on this link to see more outcomes of the Sustainability Dialogues.
Learnings from 2023:
Based on the highlights and achievements in 2023 related to education for sustainability, the EUR Sustainability Programme has identified the following focal points for next years:
Creating a cross-faculty sustainability course with degree-specific elements is complex, but holds immense potential for fostering unprecedented levels of cooperation.
Many sustainability workshops and programmes require students and employees actively to seek and prioritise them alongside their other commitments. This limits participation to those already interested, while we aim to engage a wider range of EUR students.
The EUR would benefit from measuring the sustainability literacy of its students and employees.
We do not yet have a standardised way for schools to label a sustainability-related course within our current system, making it difficult to keep track of our offer. Finding a way to do this is important for keeping track long-term.
Experimentation with transformative education often occurs on a small scale, as might be expected. These approaches could work differently when they are mainstreamed and scaled up.
Reflection
Our goal is that our graduates understand the sustainability challenges that we need to overcome in our society and environment. There is a wealth of initiatives and projects, but to address sustainability challenges effectively, we require fundamental changes in the content of curricula and how education is organised. Therefore, we will work together more effectively to use valuable insights from small-scale workshops and programmes to develop courses that will help mainstream sustainability teaching across the faculties.
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