Vision of the PBL & Sustainability Center
The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014), for which UNESCO is the lead agency, has fostered increasingly focus on integrating sustainability in educational activities on all levels. As stated by on the UNESCO homepage (http://www.unesco.org/en/esd/; Dec 2009):
“Education for sustainable development aims to help people to develop the attitudes, skills and knowledge to make informed decisions for the benefit of themselves and others, now and in the future, and to act upon these decisions ... The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014), for which UNESCO is the lead agency, seeks to integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning, in order to address the social, economic, cultural and environmental problems we face in the 21st century.”
Within the field of science and technology, the political pressure is ever more distinct to provide sustainable scientific and technological transformations to decouple the increase in problematic environmental and social impacts from economic growth, and secure a balance between the three pillars of sustainability. Several researchers within the field of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) have argued that a paradigm shift is needed in Higher Education to face these new challenges of sustainability, and the vocabulary used to express the needed educational changes includes active experiential, inquiry-based learning, real-world problem solving, critical and creative inquiry, reflective and iterative learning, learning in groups and an indicative and open curriculum.
The PBL philosophy embrace exactly those values and it has therefore been a vision of the UCPBL to establish a Centre for PBL and sustainability (PBL-SUS) to research and develop PBL methods for integrating Sustainability into Engineering and Science Education. At Aalborg University, 35-years’ experience in educating Science and Engineering students in a PBL environment has been accumulated, and The UNESCO chair in PBL in Engineering and Science education has the vision of furthering this by researching possibilities for using PBL as a framework for enhancing ESD within this field.
