Discourses and Identity: An Educational Sociology Approach to Campus Sustainability Assessment

It is widely recognized that integrating sustainability in student professional development is an important contribution of the university to transform students into citizens who are sustainability conscious and who positively impact on university campus and on society in general. Organizations and social groups that promote sustainability introduce different discourses in the university according to their interests and through this process regulate the educational responses to sustainability. Therefore, discourses influence the types of professional identities produced in higher education. The research question was: How are sustainability discourses interpreted and translated by students into their professional development and what are the implications of their identification with one or more sustainability discourses? This question was answered through research focused on graduate students’ theses. The analysis was based on Bernstein’s educational sociology theory which describes how social discourses are selected and adapted to the pedagogic context. Five different groups of students were identified based on the type of interpretation of sustainability that they favored as a framework for their research. Interpretations were constructed based on combinations of sustainability discourses adapted by students in their research and, hence, it was also possible to identify the organizations where discourses originated. This study has implications for advancing campus sustainability by evidencing that discourses that are given priority in higher education, such as curriculum content or teaching activities, could dominate students’ professional identities, thus limiting their scope for social contribution.