(269)AN EXPERIENCE IN COLLABORATIVE WORKING AT CLASS: THECASE OF THE SUBJECT “SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT ANDENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS”

摘要

Higher education institutions all around the European Union are experiencing animportant change: a convergence process intending to optimize the education quality aswell as adopting a comparable system for degrees. With this, university careers try toprepare competent professionals in their corresponding working fields. Theseprofessionals not only must possess their proper knowledge (they are supposed toacquire the expected competences) but they must also be able to get adapted to thesocial & job market requirements. They must also have a critical view of the reality andwork in a collaborative way to improve their results… and this group of transversal andgeneral competences must be trained in every subject in every degree.Moved by this, we accepted the challenge of integrating the development of certaingeneric competiences in the traditional way of working at class that is basically centeredon the transmission of knowledge.In this line, the paper we present describes the experience developed in the subject“Sustainable Development and Environmental Ethics”. This is a 6 credits free electivesubject given in the ETSID (former Technical Industrial Engineering School of Valencia)in the Polytechnic University of Valencia. This subject is focused on the TechnicalIndustrial Engineering degree but it is also chosen by students that come from severalengineering degrees. This subject chases to be a window to the state of the naturalenvironment as well as an element to students’ ecological sensitization. In addition, thissubject also tries to convince them about the need of an appropriate sustainabledevelopment and the importance of individual ethical coherent behaviour with nature. Inorder to get it, this subject aims to give to the students a wide range of environmentalknowledge. This is fundamental to be able to develop an appropriate ethical code in theirprofessional behavior when they finish the studies and they begin working. In this way,this subject is making efforts to make their jobs coherent with the environment.Considering the nature of this subject, it is not difficult to train some transversalcompetences along the semester and this is what we made with students’ collaborativeworking at class. In this way, we get a real and active students’ participation and wesuccessfully develop a series of social skills that wouldn’t be trained with the traditionallessons based on the teacher speeches. E.g.: Sensitization with the others needs,problems and expectations, adjusting personal ways of working to the collaborativeworking requirements, solving problems all together, empathy, living together with diverseand heterogeneous people, tolerance, flexibility, creativity, responsibility, initiative…