Higher Education for Sustainable Consumption: case report on the Human Ecology Master's course (University of Bordeaux, France)

摘要

The many ecological impacts of our consumption patterns have led to an increasingly evident need for Higher Education for Sustainable Consumption (HESC). HESC focuses on several complementary aspects of society in order to demonstrate the importance of consumption as a source of environmental and social impacts and to promote a sense of individual and collective responsibility. Teaching aims include training students to be capable of proposing and implementing solutions to ecological problems associated with changing modes of consumption. To achieve an effective HESC, five pedagogical principles seem essential in training students to deal with real-life complex problems and develop solutions to them: basing the pedagogical approach on a human ecology training, considering the production -consumption system as a whole; dealing with uncertainty, encouraging collaborative learning from the diversity of students; and addressing the issue of complexity by an interdisciplinary approach. This should contribute to developing the student's key competencies in sustainability such as systemic and critical thinking, handling complexity and dealing with uncertainty via different principles of learning settings. The Master's course entitled 'Human Ecology: environmental challenges related to production and consumption activities' is proposed as a case report (University of Bordeaux, France). The translation of theoretical requirements, the limitations and the assessment of the HESC's course are discussed.