What are Competencies and Sustainable Education?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In our next webinar (June 22), we cover the basics of education and sustainability.

What are Competencies and Sustainable Education?
Competencies and sustainable education. Photo: Istock/DGLimages
Reading time 2 minutes
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Helping students learn useful skills that also train them to be environmentally conscious people should be a core foundation of modern education.

Competency-based education is one of the most entrenched trends in the teaching community. However, it has evolved and today is linked to complementary issues, such as sustainability in education.

Our next webinar entitled “Sustainability Competencies and Pedagogical Approaches to Education” will be transmitted Tuesday, June 22 at 11 a. m. Mexico Central Time. This edition will be featured by Dr. Rodrigo Lozano, who will explain how to link competencies and pedagogical approaches to provide a more integral, holistic, and systemic sustainable education for future leaders, decision-makers, educators, and change agents.

Professor Lozano is a teacher at Gävle University in Sweden; he specializes in organizational sustainability issues and is currently Specialties Editor-in-Chief of the journal Frontiers in Sustainability. His extensive training and experience managing the intersections of education, competencies, and sustainability portend a highly informative discourse for those seeking to navigate the topic of modern learning and environmental didactics. To make the most of this webinar, let us review the basic concepts of competency-based education and sustainability:

An education by and for competencies

According to a report in Edu Trends, competency-based education (CBE) is a student-centered educational model focusing on developing student competencies and demonstrating and assessing their proficiency. Improving learning outcomes is a central aim; the time to achieve it is variable.

Competencies are defined as knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values. These are prioritized over merely attaining credits or certifications; competencies are considered the center of learning measurement. Therefore, competency-based education is a more holistic approach. It starts from the idea that education emerges from textbooks or the curriculum and from various life experiences that lead to specific learning and practical skills.

This teaching method aims to build a system that identifies students’ skills and develops them through functions and tasks specially designed to bring out their best in each didactic session. Such work is done in a variable time and applies to any level of education from preschool to graduate and professional or business training.

An education by and for the environment

UNESCO argues that education for sustainable development (ESD) provides students with knowledge, attitudes, skills and values to carry out environmentally responsible actions. Within this educational current, a learning process is managed that extends throughout life, reinforcing cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral dimensions of learning.

ESD is based on a student-centered pedagogy that enables them to learn from their experiences. It integrates sustainability topics into the curriculum, empowering students to assume responsibility for the environmental content they are taught and generate changes to construct a more sustainable world.

To learn more about developing skills through the competency model and how these skills form students more aware and actively involved in caring for the environment, do not miss our next webinar this Tuesday, June 22, at 11 a. m. Mexico Central Time. The webinar will be broadcast in Spanish. You can also download our Edu Trends report on competency-based learning in English and Spanish for free.

Have you applied the competency-based learning system in classes or managed sustainable education projects? What has been your experience? Tell us in the comments.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Sofía García-Bullé

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0