Methodological proposals for a sustainable consumption in the initial training of teachers

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development United Nations (UN, 2015), the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice (2017) and the recent Katowice Climate Change Conference COP24 in Poland (2018) have stressed the need for humanity to move towards more sustainable consumption patterns. The education should be considered as a key tool to promote the reflection, inspire new consumption habits to encourage significant changes in the useful resources. The challenge is to identify the teaching methods in higher education that could bring about these changes in the students, future professionals, and train them in sustainability competencies. The role of education is essential to promote reflection and inspire consumption habits that induce relevant changes on lifestyle. In this sense, the initial training of teachers is a key issue; they will be a reference for society and those responsible for the school training of future professionals. Because of this, a project of teaching innovation for sustainable consumption was carried out in the training of primary school teachers. This contribution presents a comparative study conducted in three Spanish universities. The University of Seville (US), the University of Cádiz (UCA) and the International University of Catalonia (UIC) have integrated this project in Didactic of experimental sciences and Environmental education. Each university has used different active methodologies with the aim of helping to change students' consumption habits towards more sustainable consumption and to develop competencies in sustainability in initial teacher training: Problem-Based Learning (PBL), Project-Oriented Learning (POL) and a cross-disciplinary workshop. They set out to analyse the appropriateness of different transforming methodologies promoting the integration of ESD, mainly in aspects related to consumption habits and sustainability competencies. To explore the approaches to change these aspects, an empirical study was carried out by using a quantitative methodology for data collection, which were collected by two instruments: individual footprint to measure the change in students' consumption habits before and after the project and Likert scale about sustainability competencies to measure the final level of acquisition by students. The statistical package SPSS v.24 was used for the statistical study. The results show positive changes in students' carbon footprint reduction. This change could be directly related with changes in consumer habits. High levels of acquisition of competency in sustainability are also observed. Through the innovative approaches presented, this study shows the importance of using active teaching-learning strategies promoting the integration of ESD.