1. Introduction
We are currently experiencing a global emergency marked by a series of socio-environmental problems that seriously endanger the survival of the planet [
1,
2,
3]. A diverse range of authorities and agencies are now defending the urgent need to transition to a more sustainable society [
3]. These demands have turned sustainable development into a highly relevant topic in recent literature, especially since the UN member states committed to achieving the sustainable development goals (SDG) by 2030. The United Nations Summit, held in New York in 2015, adopted the outcome document “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” [
4], set out in 17 SDGs and 169 targets to be implemented in the period of 2016–2030. These 17 interrelated goals are designed to tackle a wide range of social, economic, and environmental challenges. However, these goals will not be achieved without fundamental transformations in citizens’ actions and behaviours, and in the way societies and economies function, which are all heavily dependent on the role that education plays in this process. Accordingly, target 4.7 of SDG 4 (Quality Education) refers to the need to “ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development.” SDG 4 places the human being in the center of sustainable development and the emotional learning as a priority place. Several milestones in the field of education can shed light on how this global commitment was reached. For instance, the 1992 Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, marked a turning point in recognising the role of education, particularly university education, in moving toward sustainability [
5]. This summit called on educators at all levels and across disciplines to help ensure that citizens acquire an appropriate understanding of the problems affecting humanity [
3,
6]. In sum, this call encourages human beings to critically review damaging lifestyles, and evolve to inquire concepts as a human being close to consciousness and emotionally intelligence, based on solidarity, diversity, empathy, understanding, trust, cooperation, and a social organization [
3]. Faced with this increasingly serious situation, numerous universities have taken the decision to promote sustainability from within their institutions. In this line, among the significant initiatives signed in 1993 were the Copernicus University Charter for Sustainable Development and the Kyoto Declaration on Sustainable Development. Nonetheless, despite these efforts, for some time, the conceptualisation of sustainability has been limited to only three dimensions in the academic sphere: financial, social, and environmental. Thus, traditional theoretical models that limit sustainable development to these three dimensions seem insufficient to address this topic in all its complexity. Adapting the teaching and university management models to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the urgent needs of the world today requires a re-structuring of the educational system based on the competencies that future citizens will need for their personal and professional development. In this sense, creating academic curricula for sustainability not only involves including environmental contents in the syllabus of all subjects, but also other, more general changes in the conceptualisation of the educational process. In sum, it concerns an educational paradigm shift, trying to avoid the traditional bias toward methods that only encourage the reason-cognition development (related to traditional definition of intelligence), dealing with tasks detached from the reality, and from real local and global problems. Therefore, it is necessary to value emotions, human being affects, and the development of emotional intelligence, as a way to reach a sustainable society.
In line with this thesis, there is a widespread consensus in the literature on the need to promote an education system that develops responsible, healthy individuals with the necessary skills to face current and future challenges. Achieving the SDGs implies focusing on financial, social, environmental, and scientific dimensions, in addition to developing citizens’ emotional aspects, which define the framework for decision-making and actions in a process of reflection-action. Shaping personality is an interaction of cognitive, physical, linguistic, social, affective and emotional factors, dimensions, and fields, with the latter being very significant in education. Education for sustainable development will only be effective if it adopts a different image of humankind, society, life, and nature. In addition, from there, the new sense of education is to live for one another, so that we can all live together in harmony with ourselves and with our environment. This requires a different anthropology and ethics in which students are not only equipped with the competencies for sustainability related to their studies, but are also instructed in emotional competencies. These transversal competencies are crucial in a globalised technological society where, paradoxically, people are becoming increasingly individualistic, exhibiting behaviours that seriously endanger the Earth’s survival and the well-being of their fellow men and women.
In sum, education for sustainable development (ESD) implies a holistic approach for the development of students’ competencies [
7]. It entails the defence of integrating and interdisciplinary approaches that foster skills such as problem solving, critical thought, action competencies, and systems thinking. It requires, therefore, systems of learning that deconstruct existing forms of knowledge and understanding, that critically reflect on the values, beliefs, and worldviews that sustain them, and that build new shared meanings, which can contribute to sustainability. It involves systemic thinking that develops the capacity to see interconnections between different dimensions (environmental, developmental, social, economic, cultural), and shows how the complexity of systems and situations can contribute to the effective resolution of the problems of sustainability [
8,
9]. ESD aims to provide learning opportunities in the real world and produce citizens who are capable of experiencing situations that encourage reflection around the ethical and affective dimensions in interpersonal relations and with nature. Based on this definition, education for sustainable development implies—among many other things—taking into consideration not only people’s cognitive aspects, but also their affective aspects, actions, and ethical values to ensure their complete development [
7,
10,
11]. Hence, there seems to be a generalised consensus about the importance of emotions as antecedents to any sustainable behaviour and action. Interacting in a sustainable way means learning to feel in harmony with oneself and others. In line with this, the constructive management of feelings plays a key role in education since, together with other elements, it fosters the ability to achieve common goals such as democratic processes, economic productivity, social cohesion, equity, human rights, and ecological sustainability [
4].
Similarly, among the essential competencies that students should acquire in education for sustainable development, Wals [
12] includes the following: ability to feel empathy, sympathy, solidarity, compassion, and being open-minded. By developing these competencies, graduates will become positive agents of change in their jobs and lives [
7]. The present study follows this direction by focusing on the study of emotions, and, more specifically, on the ability to understand and manage emotions—emotional intelligence (EI)—by considering it a core construct in developing education for sustainable development. We also propose a model based on the premise that well-developed EI will impact not only the future graduate’s sustainable life—as has been described in the literature–but also the classroom atmosphere in the short term, by supporting the development of compassionate attitudes that will contribute to improving students’ engagement with consequent benefits for their academic performance.
The paper is structured in three sections. First, the literature review provides support for the variables and the relationships posed in the theoretical model. Specifically, we explain the relationship between emotional intelligence and academic performance through compassion and engagement as key agents in this relationship. Second, the methodology is described, and the results are reported. Finally, some conclusions are drawn, and the study’s limitations, implications for teaching, and future research lines are discussed.
5. Conclusions
The main aim of this study was to explore the importance of EI training in the teaching–learning process, in response to the need to invest in developing students’ emotional competences as an essential premise in education for sustainable development. Specifically, results (see
Table 6) reveal that H
1 regarding the direct relationship between EI and student’s academic performance is rejected, supporting the rest of the hypotheses (H
2, H
3, H
4) regarding the mediating role of compassion and engagement in the EI–academic performance relationship. In sum, the basic question we have attempted to answer in this research is whether good EI development influences students’ academic performance through compassion and engagement. Our study provides empirical evidence that the EI–academic performance relationship is mediated by compassion and engagement. Moreover, it sheds some light regarding the EI–academic performance relationship since previous literature offers mixed results [
84,
85]. The results from the empirical analysis can be generalised since they were generated from a sample comprising 21 academic disciplines from a wide range of business and economic sciences, technological and experimental sciences, health sciences and social sciences, covering three geographical regions and also including a secondary school.
This study’s main contribution to the EI–academic performance debate in a context of education for sustainable development is its inclusion in the model of compassion and engagement as mediating variables in the relationship. Including compassion is an additional innovation since this variable has usually been confined to the fields of theology, philosophy, or sociology, and, more recently, organisations, and, therefore, its analysis from the educational perspective is not without interest. In the educational setting, EI plays an important role as an individual resource and an antecedent that enables students to be more compassionate toward their fellow students and also toward themselves (self-compassion). In fact, previous research in nursing students confirm the positive relationship between self-compassion and emotional intelligence [
86]. This paper, therefore, makes a valuable contribution to compassion and sustainability research by demonstrating the significant role that self-compassion plays in educational settings [
87,
88]. The results also demonstrate the indirect effect of compassion (through commitment) on academic performance. This goes in line with the practical recommendations of previous literature of the relevant role that compassion plays as a component of the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) competence for sustainable consciousness toward the present generation and future generations [
89].
In sum, our study is coherent with the need to return to a more humanistic education that incorporates a new language and new content in which technical-professional training goes hand-in-hand with moral and socio-emotional learning, in which the pedagogical discourse is situated not only in the means, but also in what is learned and what this knowledge is for [
90]. Added to this perspective is the need to incorporate emotions into the teaching–learning process and give them a greater role by establishing the relationship between emotion (affective learning) and reason (cognitive learning) as an additional way of strengthening and developing the individual. Moreover, the idea of enhancing affective skills, such as compassion, is encompassed in the goal of sustainable development since compassion for other people is positively related to pro-environmental tendencies, according to previous studies [
85]. In recent years, both the social and the experimental sciences have opened up to the incorporation of emotion as a field of study and in practical applications. Disciplines as diverse as psychology and medicine, or economics and business administration, have lifted emotions out of the subordinate role they played in higher education curricula. In the former cases, they are applied as agents in health care, and, in the latter, as the bases for rational decisions that stimulate the economic and business management process.
The research has several limitations, which, in turn, suggests lines for future research. First, the sample was mainly comprised of higher education students with the exception of a smaller group of secondary school students. It would, therefore, be useful to validate the study at different stages of education and increase the number of secondary schools in the sample in order to compare the outcomes. Second, although the sample included mostly Spanish students, a large group of South American students were also recruited through an online university. Future research could, therefore, replicate this study in other European, Asian, or North American contexts in order to draw more generalised conclusions that take into account other cultural and geographical settings. On this point, recall that the cultural factor is closely related to the way emotions are perceived [
91]. A broader based study would, therefore, yield more robust results that could be generalised at a global level.
Regarding the implications for teachers, the research exposes the need to further strengthen the trend to include humanistic and affective subjects in the curricula. Such subjects highlight the acquisition of values, the importance of respect and understanding among peers, and the appropriate ethical and emotional development of students. Moreover, in the context of education for sustainable development, EI skills of the teaching staff (not only of the students) is also a crucial parameter in academic results, starting from the emotional skills of university lectures but also going back to the skill of teachers even at early education stages, since EI is a skill that can start to develop from early childhood, as previous research points out [
92] Hence, future research should be addressed to analyse, at the same time, the EI skills of teachers and their students as well as explore the long-term effects on professional performance. Additionally, it would be useful to incorporate learning methodologies that combine instruction in the content related to the degree subject with others that foster emotional competencies. Finally, as part of the incipient promotion of EI and compassion in the classroom, it should not be forgotten that socially sustainable organisations can only be built by training tomorrow’s professionals to be compassionate as an integral part of their education. This ambitious objective also entails training teachers in the necessary competencies to impart an education for sustainable development. This challenge should be approached from two angles: the acquisition of such competencies and the acquisition of professional competencies to give students an education for sustainable development. Teachers, as citizens, also need the skills to act as such in sustainable societies. As educators of future citizens, the specific competencies for their professional careers should also be oriented toward sustainability and should enable them, in turn, to educate students in the principles and values of sustainable development.