The efficacy of real-world experiences and service learning for fostering competences for sustainable development in higher education

One of the main challenges for teachers of higher education is to design learning activities that will allow students to effectively acquire sustainability competences. Education therefore needs to be re-oriented to a combination of interdisciplinarity, envisioning, creativity, fun. This paper aims at contributing to this demand by asking students to assess the fostering capacity of alternative learning activities, i.e. a real-world experience and a service learning project. The data was collected through surveys and focus groups. The results demonstrate that students perceived to have developed sustainability competences in each learning activity in somewhat varying levels. To ensure the development of a wide-spectrum of sustainability competences, teachers are advised to combine different learning activities or to include a variety of characteristics to foster as many competences as possible, especially because of the interplay and interactions between the different competences.