Reorienting an Educational Psychology Course to Address Sustainability: A Case Study

• Main Author: Khalil Nehal Lotfy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2012-01-01
• Series: Discourse and Communication for Sustainable Education
• Subjects: educational psychology; physiological psychology; education for sustainable education; higher education; teaching; active learning; green intelligence; health
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2478/v10230-012-0008-8

Due to the rapidly changing knowledge, teachers are supposed to teach their students ways of thinking and gathering information, not certain contents that would change shortly. In this sense, sustainability, which, in part, means the preparation of an individual who has the ability to practise critical thinking and to find creative solutions to the problems they face, is considered a must. This paper focuses on the integration of sustainability in curricula, specifically ways of introducing it to students in higher education institutions that provide highly specific and specialised knowledge and skills. So, this study presents a framework for reorienting a university course in the field of physiological psychology to address sustainability. The results of the quantitative analysis showed significant differences at the level of 0.001 between the pre- and post-testing of students’ knowledge of and attitudes towards sustainability in favour of the post-test. While results of qualitative analysis showed positive transformation of students’ practices health wise.