Collaboration, leadership, sand sustianability in higher education: How universities operate and align sustianability in education

The current PhD-project can be said to examine two (separate) conceptualizations in higher education with the topic of sustainability as a common denominator. The two aspects examined; cross-institutional collaboration in engineering education contexts and middle-manager leadership in higher education (whereof the first resulted in a published article, and the second is in review). The project has included a systematic review, a qualitative interview-based article, and the current work pertains to sustainability in student-projects (in a PBL learning environment). For coherence to occur among the different studies within the overarching PhD project, the final article aims to combine findings from the prior studies, which has led to the assumption that collaboration for both students and researchers is explicitly mentioned (supranational, national, and local demands) as a prerequisite for education. Since findings from the middle-manager leadership point of view led to the awareness of the delicate act of managing researchers in a higher education context, and that even with a concrete institutional strategy, there are always different perceptions on how to achieve decided upon initiatives (and resistance). Therefore, students are potentially a more relevant target group for working with sustainability in practice (in their semester projects), as they are required to complete these to progress, and do not have the same (external requirements as researchers/academics). These prospects are what currently is examined, with the method of inviting students to a future workshop concerning sustainability in their education/semester projects at Aalborg University.