Thomas Haines
A baseline assessment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within European Student Union web environments
Haines, Thomas; Longhurst, James; Bonnett, Sam
Authors
Assistant Vice Chancellor, Environment and Sustainability Jim Longhurst James.Longhurst@uwe.ac.uk
Professor
Sam Bonnett Sam.Bonnett@uwe.ac.uk
Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science
Abstract
The world of student unions is under-researched, particularly relating to global issues and challenges, despite them holding a large proportion of the future workforce. At present, the European Students Union (ESU) has a duty of care to approximately 15 million European students, with subsequent policies and information. This paper addresses the disparity between these areas, with a specific focus on the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals - in partnership with the UK National Union of Students, under the Dissertations for Good Programme. An innovative web mining method was created and refined over a 10-week data collection period on ESU public web domains using websites from January 2014-18. A pre-determined selection of seventeen key terms were used to quantify the overall knowledge and understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals on a country by country basis, with the UK National Union of Students as a control during the study. This resulted in the successful analysis of 39 ESUs, showing a wide range of keyword abundance, knowledge depth and breadth across member nations. 89% of all key term sites were located within the UK & Switzerland unions, creating 86% of all key terms found – highlighting disparity against developments in European Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). To conclude, this research has highlighted both the lack of visual representation of the Sustainable Development Goals to students and therefore, the variation in education quality across nations, allowing for potential inequality of sustainability skillsets required by graduates on a global scale to tackle global challenges.
Citation
Haines, T., Longhurst, J., & Bonnett, S. (2019). A baseline assessment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within European Student Union web environments. Meliora: International Journal of Student Sustainability Research, 2(1), https://doi.org/10.22493/meliora.2.1.0014
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Apr 24, 2019 |
Online Publication Date | Apr 24, 2019 |
Publication Date | Apr 24, 2019 |
Deposit Date | May 13, 2021 |
Publicly Available Date | May 14, 2021 |
Journal | Meliora: International Journal of Student Sustainability Research |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 2 |
Issue | 1 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.22493/meliora.2.1.0014 |
Public URL | https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7381100 |
Publisher URL | https://meliora.soton.ac.uk/articles/10.22493/Meliora.2.1.0014/ |
Files
A baseline assessment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within European Student Union web environments
(1.8 Mb)
PDF
Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
You might also like
A university’s transformational change agenda
(2023)
Book Chapter
Air and Water Pollution XXX
(2022)
Book
Challenges and opportunities for local action to improve air quality
(2022)
Presentation / Conference
Downloadable Citations
About UWE Bristol Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@uwe.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search