Sustainability in higher education is not limited to the activities that take place on campus every day. It also involves progressively rethinking how we teach, how we learn, and how we prepare future professionals to make decisions in the face of increasingly complex scenarios.
In this vein, UNESCO IESALC promotes training and capacity-building initiatives aimed at strengthening Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in higher education institutions. The program brought together participants from universities in Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, and other Latin American countries, creating a regional forum for exchanging experiences and tools to incorporate sustainability in a cross-cutting and context-specific manner into teaching processes. As part of this process, Johanna Zambrano, M.Sc., a professor in the Petroleum Engineering program at FICT, completed the Bootcamp on Instructional Design and Education for Sustainable Development, a training experience focused on applying the principles of ESD to teaching practice.
During the program, together with Paulina Criollo, professor of Sustainability Sciences, and Raquel Borbor Rosales, CISE Education Specialist, the team worked on the pedagogical redesign of the Drilling course, incorporating strategies that connect technical content with decision-making, impact analysis, collaborative work, and the search for responsible solutions. Rather than simply proposing changes to the content, this type of experience allows for incremental steps toward a more comprehensive education, in which students can analyze the challenges of their profession by considering technical, environmental, social, and economic dimensions.
In this way, ESPOL strengthens a vision of sustainability that is also built upon the evolution of teaching and learning experiences, paving the way to train professionals capable of responding more comprehensively to the challenges of the future.
Related Sustainable Development Goals
SDG 4: Quality Education.
SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.
SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals.
