Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

University courses all over the world are struggling with ways to help their students prepare for an uncertain future. In a three-year project, we are working with 42 bachelor’s programmes of Radboud University (the Netherlands) to investigate how sustainability as theme and ‘response-ability’ (Haraway) is or could be integrated in the education of the university. We have chosen a bottom-up approach to investigate this. In the first phase of this project, we conducted 45 minute interviews with a lecturer and a student from each programme. In the semi-structured interview, we asked them about their experience of the programme and how it relates to sustainability challenges. Moving from ‘what is’ to ‘what if’, we challenged them to think about the future of their programme. Our findings show that lecturers and students alike have difficulty defining their discipline in other terms than the content of the programme. When reflecting on the future of the programme, they find it hard to think outside of the confines of the programme as it is. This attitude makes it difficult to adapt a curriculum to sustainability challenges, as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) requires a focus on the skills, attitudes and competences of the student at least as much as on the content. In out paper, we will present a discourse analysis of the transcribed anonymised interviews to reveal the underlying interplay of disciplinary identity, professional identity, and programme identity, methods of teaching and assessment, and the need to gear curricula towards sustainable development.