Text Mining Assessment of Sustainability Learning Topics at Higher Education in Japan

Abstract

Higher education has a central role for nurturing sustainable mindsets for the future well-being of society and the environment. That is why knowledge generation, teaching, and social innovation are the main components of sustainable development goals. In this light, recent research that aims to search for best content and practices in education for sustainability has increasingly focused on the analysis of sustainability coursework, programs, and projects. However, several studies demonstrate the low presence of sustainability contents in higher education curriculum across the world, pointing to an urgent need to integrate sustainability in its varied dimensions (ecological, economic, and social) into the curriculum. In order to address the issues above, this paper will assess the correspondence of sustainability topics of interest for society at large and for university students through the use of text mining techniques. For this analysis two types of textual data were used. The first was extracted from newspaper's articles from the Asahi Shimbun, which is a reference that largely reflects the sustainability views of society. The second was extracted from students' reports written about sustainability during the courses of interdisciplinary sciences of the Liberal Arts and General Education of Kyoto University. Both types of textual data were analyzed and the results were visualized according to the frequency and co-occurrence of appearance of words. The results demonstrate that, after university learning, students became aware of their own individual role in nearby spheres of action. Moreover, the results show that the sustainability views of students and the society partially overlap with different degrees of intensity, from dissimilar contextual backgrounds. Comprehensively, while the university courses further emphasize biocentric and ecocentric views, in contrast, society's views tend to focus on topics related to policy making and the role of enterprises.