Purpose

This study aims at understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute to sustainable development, by designing their programmes for bringing about a transformative impact on communities and students, and also to examine what alternative pedagogical approaches could be used for that. In the past decades, HEIs have increasingly created social innovation (SI) programmes, as a way to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These community-oriented and field-based programmes are difficult to ally with conventional classroom education. This study explores how these programmes could integrate the participatory approach and what would be the benefits. It also investigates the effectiveness of the experiential learning approach for teaching sustainability.

Design/methodology/approach

A case study method is used to document SI projects initiated by an HEI programme in rural India.

Findings

It was found that the participatory approach contributes to empowering communities and also benefits the students in terms of academic, professional and personal growth. Empirical findings show that experiential learning is an efficient method to teach sustainability. Ultimately, both pedagogical approaches are found to be mutually beneficial.

Originality/value

This study fills a gap in the literature, by providing empirical evidence on how HEI can implement innovative educational strategies such as participatory approach and experiential learning in their programmes towards teaching sustainability. A conceptual model for HEI interested in developing similar programmes is also proposed. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies focusing on the context of Indian HEI.

中文翻译：

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印度高等教育中采用参与式和基于案例的方法进行可持续教育和社区发展

目的

本研究旨在了解高等教育机构 (HEIs) 如何通过设计对社区和学生带来变革性影响的项目来为可持续发展做出贡献，并探讨可以采用哪些替代教学方法来实现这一目标。在过去的几十年里，高等教育机构越来越多地创建社会创新（SI）项目，作为实现联合国可持续发展目标的一种方式。这些面向社区和实地的项目很难与传统的课堂教育结合起来。本研究探讨了这些计划如何整合参与式方法以及会带来什么好处。它还调查了体验式学习方法对教学可持续性的有效性。

设计/方法论/途径

案例研究方法用于记录印度农村地区高等教育机构项目发起的 SI 项目。

发现

研究发现，参与式方法有助于增强社区能力，也有利于学生的学术、专业和个人成长。实证研究结果表明，体验式学习是教授可持续发展的有效方法。最终，这两种教学方法被发现是互惠互利的。

原创性/价值

这项研究填补了文献中的空白，提供了高等教育机构如何在其可持续教学计划中实施创新教育策略（例如参与式方法和体验式学习）的经验证据。还提出了有兴趣开发类似项目的高等教育机构的概念模型。据作者所知，这项研究是最早关注印度高等教育机构背景的研究之一。