Competences and competence-based learning for sustainable development

Abstract

In the context of education for sustainable development (ESD), there is extensive literature on what should be taught and learned in terms of knowledge, skills and values. What stands out in most of this literature is a prominent attention to values. The underlying idea is that value education is needed to prepare students for a role as ‘agents of change’, able and willing to transform our current society into a more sustainable one. What is strikingly absent from these approaches to ESD is the notion that there may be a valid diversity in perspectives on sustainable development, whereas this diversity is in fact a key feature of sustainable development in a pluralistic society. In the transition towards a sustainable (or at least more sustainable) society, the ability to deal with this diversity of perspectives will thus be crucial. We therefore argue that the key competence for academic professionals to successfully contribute to sustainable development will be their ability to think, communicate, learn and collaborate across the boundaries that divide these perspectives. We refer to the ability to cross such boundaries as ‘transboundary competence’. This chapter applies the principles of competencebased learning to identify the characteristics of learning environments in which this competence can be developed.