Abstract
One of the crucial facets to make the transition to a sustainable society happen is education. The Berlin declaration (2019) expresses this importance by announcing the fact that ‘transformative learning for sustainable development is a necessity for our survival and that of the future generations’. A key mean to bring about the change required is the incorporation of transformative learning for sustainable development in quality assessment procedures to guarantee continuous improvement of HEIs towards sustainable development. But do quality assurance agencies in Europe support these practices? To answer this research question, the ESG guidelines and the quality assurance frameworks used by quality assurance agencies in the European higher Education area were collected and analysed. With the help of NVivo software first a word frequency analyses was conducted. Afterwards the research team used a common and evolving HESD-oriented heuristic to develop senziting concepts in a coding scheme. A combination of inductive and deductive coding approaches were used to analyse the different frameworks. Regarding to the ESG guidelines the link to sustainability is implicit and unclear and except ‘student-centered learning’, ‘experiential learning’ and ‘active learning’ concepts linked to transformative learning are rarely mentioned. Also little support for transformative learning for sustainable development was found in the national QA frameworks. Some exceptions were the QA frameworks used in the United Kingdom, Holy See, Estonia, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. Furthermore, when analysing other QA documents also some good practices were found in Andorra, Austria, France and the Netherlands.
Presenters
Lise JanssensStudent, PhD, Hasselt University, Limburg (nl), Belgium Tom Kuppens
Universiteit Hasselt Eglė Staniškienė
Professor, School of Economics and Bussines, Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania Ingrid Mulà Pons De Vall
Associate Professor, Institute of Educational Sciences, Universitat de Girona, Girona, Spain Anne B. Zimmermann
Associate Senior Research Scientist, Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern, Switzerland
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Education, Assessment and Policy
KEYWORDS
Quality, Assurance, Transformative, Learning, Higher, Education, Sustainability
