Developing Holistic, Pluralistic Action Competency for Sustainability Through Courses with an Education Partner

Developing Action Competency for Sustainability is crucial in current education to achieve the UN 2030 agenda for sustainable development. This paper focuses on action competency for sustainability relating to the students’ experience of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), considering holistic and pluralistic variables in a course provided jointly with an education partner. Our study collected data from 30 higher education students taking a "Climate Emergency: Towards a Culture of Sustainability" course in the fall semester of 2024. We designed an online survey and applied it using Google Forms. The Jamovi software was employed to analyze the results. A convenience sampling method evaluated the participants’ development of action competency for sustainability. The primary findings are that our approach helps develop students’ action competency for sustainability. Our results revealed that the holism and pluralism variables significantly correlated with developing students' Action Competency for Sustainability. This research provides guidelines to higher education institutions seeking to jointly promote Action Competency for Sustainability with education partners.