Fair Tales of Interdisciplinary Learning: Unveiling Students Voices and Competencies Evolution in a Challenge-Based Learning Summer School

This innovative practice full paper aims to describe how an interdisciplinary group of engineering students developed sustainability competencies during a two-week Challenge-Based Learning summer school on analysing the impacts and sustainability of digital education and its infrastructure. Our contribution aims to create a “fair” narrative of this experience, taking into account multiple perspectives, and building a transparent and representative reconstruction of the students' competence development. Our work is qualitative in nature: we gathered pedagogical insights, participants' emotions, thoughts, and experiences, by relying on a variety of data sources (of which the primary was student diaries), ultimately creating a micro-ethnography of the course. This approach allowed us to identify and track the evolution of the GreenComp competencies over time, create team profiles, and gain insights on the evolution of the students' thoughts, perspectives, and social dynamics. While further research is needed to refine the approach, reduce researcher burden, and test it in other environments, this paper aims to start the process of creating an analysis method that lets teachers and researchers reconstruct the students' learnings, experiences, and personal reflections in a rich and transparent way, going beyond the creation of all-too-reductive performance metrics, and contributing to the ongoing discussion on the development of non-technical competencies in engineering education.