Focus: How the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are embedded in teaching.
How is sustainability included in it? How did you decide what was appropriate?
We teach the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of sustainability reporting, as global standards include indicators that relate directly to them. We teach the SDGs more broadly as part of the context of challenges to which organizations must respond today. Case studies that locate students in the kinds of everyday challenges that decision-makers in organisations today are facing.
If it uses any unusual/original pedagogy or assessment approaches to do this, what are these?
A lot of the teaching is practice orientated, to prepare students for decision-making and leadership in organisations and institutions. We hope to develop in the field dissertations that can address sustainability related problems in the upcoming year.
What sustainability-relevant ‘takeaways’ would you expect students to gain?
We emphasise above all the importance of critical and reflexive thinking to address the ways in which today’s business practices may be contributing to social and environmental crises. We tend to strive for a constructive critical perspective, which seeks opportunities and possibilities for socially innovative practices.
Key intended learning outcome from this experience?
That students would soon start to want to talk about the challenges of sustainability (almost) as much as the lecturers!