Legal Education and Teachers’ Integrated Competencies for Sustainable Development

Abstract

At a time when higher education planning is required to focus not on inputs but on outputs—namely, on objectives aimed at equipping learners with the knowledge and skills which are necessary to solve real-world problems—this study seeks to identify the integrated competencies for sustainable development of teachers and researchers providing legal higher education, to analyze their level of satisfaction, to identify pressing issues, and to share experiences with other scholars and researchers. A research study has been conducted among lecturers at our university, and selected results are presented here.
 In order to achieve the research objectives, the study examines and synthesizes the concepts, frameworks, and approaches related to sustainable development, and focuses on analyzing the general level of satisfaction with integrated competencies and how this varies according to teachers’ academic ranks. The study had been involved 28 lecturers teaching at the School of Law of IKH ZASAG University during the 2024–2025 academic year.
 UNESCO’s “Education for Sustainable Development: Learning Objectives” includes “Integrated problem-solving competency” and identifies a total of eight integrated competencies as key competencies for sustainable education. These have been incorporated into the tiered structure of sustainability competencies proposed by Wiek and others. In this study, these eight integrated competencies were adopted as the theoretical and methodological foundation of the research.
Some findings indicate that normative and collaboration competencies has been rated as “good” at the highest level by participants, whereas strategic, anticipatory, and integrated problem-solving competencies has been rated the lowest.