Interdisciplinarity and the fostering of sustainable competences - implications and limitations

This article presents findings from case study research of an interdisciplinary approach to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) at Higher Education (HE) bachelor level. The interdisciplinary approach was applied in the ‘Sustainable Competences in Higher Education’ (Sustain-Comp) project, funded by Erasmus Plus (2022-2024). The research question was: To what extent did the interdisciplinary approach to teaching ESD foster sustainable competences – and what were the implications and limitations? Participants in the project were lecturers and researchers from University of Agder in Norway, Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, UCL University College in Denmark. The Community of Prac-tice (COP) developed an interdisciplinary 10 ECTS curriculum that was tested during fall semes-ter 2023 in a full-scale pilot for 25 students. It was integrated in an English as a Second Lan-guage course (ESL) in the Teacher Education department, at UCL University College. The find-ings suggest that the interdisciplinary, ESD 1,2, and 3 approaches to some extent fostered sus-tainable competences among students regarding cognition (new knowledge), socio-emotions (engaging in problems), behavior (act for solutions).