Contribution of higher education to the Sustainable Development Goals from teaching

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become entrenched in higher education institutions (HEIs) for their commitment to training people with relevant key competencies to address them. The article examines how teaching has been configured as the dimension with the greatest potential to incorporate sustainable development and how, together with research, it is considered one of the main areas of contribution to the achievement of the SDGs, concretized in the integration of these objectives to the study plans of the official degrees that, as a training action, are carried out. From the review of the Report of the Second World Survey of the International Association of Universities on Higher Education, Research and Sustainable Development, the annual Report of the Agreement on the SDGs of the Global Alliance and the Dossier of the Spanish Network for Development Sustainable, each SDG analyzes the relevant actions of integration of these Global Objectives in the teaching function and references to experiences as case studies. The analysis of the results shows a high variability between the universities regarding the degree of approach of each of the SDGs and the tendency to identify as “well-established work”, the one carried out with SDG 4, as a priority from teaching. The case studies analyzed show a significant differentiation regarding the types of actions they carry out and their trends. The use of surveys such as those analyzed are insufficient to observe the development of integration in the curricula, more experiences such as that developed by REDS are needed, as well as online platforms in which teachers present their experiences of curricular redesigns and incorporation from the SDGs to the curricula and mapping of the new degrees that are emerging.