Understanding the challenge of promoting action competence among university students in sustainability education

Abstract

Sustainability education aims at promoting the knowledge, skills and values needed for empowering students to tackle complex socio-environmental issues. Emancipatory approaches to sustainability education are also concerned with developing action competence in students. In contrast to a behavior change approach, in which students are induced to behave in a certain way determined by a teacher or other external actors, action competence gives priority to collective actions and requires learners themselves to form their own criteria for decision making and choose their actions in a conscious way. In this article, we will study what are the different components of action competence, how they relate to each other, which type of knowledge, skills and values are related to it, which kind of teaching activities have shown to be successful in stimulating action competence in students and what are the main challenges for promoting it among university students.