The Practice
This case study presents evidence of how interdisciplinarity was incorporated as a pilot into the PGT unit Sustainability and Ethics in Global Supply Chains (54 students), part of the MSc in Global Operations and Supply Chain Management at the Business School – where Fatima is Unit Director. The aim of this pilot was twofold:
- To evidence how sustainability challenges require collaboration from practitioners and researchers from different disciplines.
- To offer students the possibility of engaging with other disciplines’ perspectives on the topics covered in the unit.
Interdisciplinarity is essential for nurturing the holistic, systems-based thinking in our students – needed for tackling global challenges. Engaging with different disciplines allows students to see firsthand how expertise from various fields is crucial for addressing these challenges —and for preparing students to shape a more sustainable future (Aragon-Correa et al., 2017; Barth et al., 2007; De Kraker et al., 2007; Williams et al., 2017). Relying on traditional, siloed approaches not only limits our progress towards a fairer, more equitable society, able to flourish within planetary boundaries, but also risks oversimplifying problems and their resolutions (Gregory & Miller, 2014; Sharma et al., 2022). We are of the view that to deliver a truly future‑ready education, business schools must weave interdisciplinarity into their core curricula (Aragon-Correa et al., 2017; Bagley et al., 2020).
To offer this experience, the unit featured two guest sessions from colleagues outside the Business School:
- Dr. Neha Chandarana (Senior Lecturer in the School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering) introduced students to Life Cycle Assessment as a tool supporting the transition to a Circular Economy, its possibilities, caveats and limitations.
- Professor Ruzanna Chitchyan (School of Computer Science) discussed how advanced technologies support implementation of circular supply chains.
The design of this initiative was aligned to the learning outcomes for the unit. it was also discussed with the Education Lead in the relevant academic group and endorsed by the Director of Education at the Business School.
The Impact
This pilot enhanced student’s appreciation of the interdependencies between social, environmental, and economic factors in a company’s approach to sustainability, as well as the critical role of collaboration and technology to realise sustainability objectives. Ultimately, preparing students better for the future (Advance HE/QAA, 2021; AdvancedHE, 2023).
Students’ experience:
The end of unit feedback and a focus group revealed students’ appreciation for the interdisciplinary sessions. They welcomed the opportunity of listening to insights from different disciplines and reported that having these sessions advanced their awareness of the need for pluralistic views when learning about sustainability related topics.
“I really enjoyed having the guest speakers from other disciplines. It is the only course that had good speakers like that and I think other units would benefit from this”.
“It’s better for us to understand more information about sustainability …It’s very important for all organisations and business in the future, so we can understand more knowledge from other Schools and other professors”.
Guest lecturer’s experience:
Dr. Neha Chandarana
My lecture introduced the students to the process of conducting a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), with considerations for the benefits and drawbacks of the method as well as a brief comparison with other environmental impact assessment methods. Following an introductory lecture, the students were asked to complete an LCA case study in small groups. They were given a choice of products, and access to databases to help them consider the materials, processes, and impacts associated with their product.
Why this topic?
This topic was chosen as it gave the students the opportunity to experience first-hand the complexities of sustainability assessment in practice; in businesses, the teams and individuals responsible for procurement and supply chain management may overlook the challenges associated with assessment of sustainability, so this was an interesting lesson for them. It was also of interest for me to understand the difference in perspective, to enable me to improve teaching in my own unit, “Composite Materials for Sustainability (AENGM0092)”.
How did you feel teaching students from a different discipline?
Teaching students from a different discipline was really interesting and eye-opening as I faced questions from the students that were quite different from the questions I get when teaching science and engineering students. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on the terminology and definitions that I use in my teaching, and this learning will definitely be incorporated in the next iteration of this teaching exchange!
Why did you accept to take part in this initiative?
I accepted to take part in the initiative as I thought it would be interesting to collaborate with Fatima and to have the opportunity to meet students from different backgrounds. I also learned from the students and from Fatima, and hope that the learning experience for our students will improve as a result.
Prof. Chitchyan
Prof. Chitchyan’s chosen topic “What can Software Do for Sustainability” provided an overview of the impacts that software solutions and digitalization as a whole have on the business and society: both positive (through optimization of resources and substituting physical goods for digital, e.g., travel for video conferencing, printed books for e-readers) and negative (e.g., through accelerated obsolescence of goods, e.g., iPhones, and emerging risks, e.g., baking in biases through poorly designed AI tools). She then demonstrated a case study of re-designing the fossil fuels-based energy system into de-centralised, distributed renewables based local energy system. Then, the students were challenged to work in small groups to derive their own circular supply chain for apple farming (as a case study), using paper printout props (e.g, for crated of apples, shops, cider makers, waste from pressed apples, digital solutions, etc.)
Why this topic?
Prof. Chitchyan deemed this content particularly relevant, as it provided a deeper understanding on what the technologies (IoT and blockchain) actually are and how they work, as well as clearly demonstrated that the will of the business owner drives the way that their business is organised. In other words, the same technologies can be used for sustainable, circular supply chain delivery, or for “profit maximization at all costs”.
How did you feel teaching students from a different discipline?
“Given that I have been teaching a Conversion MSc program at the School of Computer Science, which works on educating a cohort of international BSc graduate students from multiple backgrounds (from Accounting to Physics) in Computer Science, I found the interaction with the current cohort quite easy.”
Why did you accept to take part in this initiative?
“As a ‘Professor in Software Engineering for Sustainability’, I am rather enthusiast about supporting sustainability related teaching, learning, and research initiatives. I also recognise the criticality of appreciation of interdisciplinary interdependencies. In this case in particular, on the one hand, businesses pay for engineering software ‘in their image’, on the other, software is baked into society and environment through the business models that it supports. Thus, it is critical to educate the future generation of business leaders as well as software engineers on how a more sustainable society can emerge from their vision of software supported sustainable business ventures.”
Next Steps
We want to keep building collaborations with colleagues across Schools to deliver sustainable development education beyond disciplinary perspectives. For our case unit, it is planned to maintain at least two interdisciplinary sessions per year.
The Software Engineering Discipline and Practice unit, which is part of the MSc in Computer Science conversion degree, holds a session on the topic of Sustainability with a 2-hour long workshop. In the 25/26 edition of the module, we plan to run a joined session with the Business School students, encouraging students to work together in mixed inter-disciplinary groups towards developing solutions for sustainable businesses.
Neha and Fatima did a teaching exchange in the 2024-2025 academic year, whereby Fatima delivered an interactive workshop session in TB1 for students in the unit Composite Materials for Sustainability. In the future we will continue this teaching exchange and iteratively adapt the content of our teaching to ensure the topics remain relevant to the units and the students, as well as ensuring we keep up with changing practices and policies where relevant.
We acknowledge that implementing these sessions comes with its challenges, they often go unrecognised in workload models and can clash with existing teaching responsibilities. It would be great to see a University-wide initiative encouraging and supporting interdisciplinarity in education—by recognising these activities in workload allocations and fostering opportunities for cross-School collaboration. Such an initiative could create a shared space for staff from diverse disciplines to codesign learning experiences, strengthening systems thinking competence in our students.
We conclude by making a call to prioritise interdisciplinary education at university level – to better prepare our graduates to navigate and address the complex, interconnected challenges of our world.
Contact
Dr. Fatima Lopez Castellanos (fatima.lopezcastellanos@bristol.ac.uk)
Lecturer in Sustainability and Operations
Reference list
Advance HE/QAA. (2021). Education for Sustainable Development Guidance (Issue March). https://www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/education-for-sustainable-development
AdvancedHE. (2023). Essential Frameworks for enhancing student success – Education for Sustainable Development. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/framework-education-sustainable-development
Aragon-Correa, J. A., Marcus, A. A., Rivera, J. E., & Kenworthy, A. L. (2017). Sustainability management teaching resources and the challenge of balancing planet, people, and profits. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 16(3), 469–483. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2017.0180
Bagley, C. E., Sulkowski, A. J., Nelson, J. S., Waddock, S., & Shrivastava, P. (2020). A path to developing more insightful business school graduates: A systems-based, experimental approach to integrating law, strategy, and sustainability. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 19(4), 541–568. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMLE.2018.0036
Barth, M., Godemann, J., Rieckmann, M., & Stoltenberg, U. (2007). Developing key competencies for sustainable development in higher education. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 8(4), 416–430. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676370710823582
De Kraker, J., Lansu, A., & Van Dam-Mieras, R. (2007). Competences and competence-based learning for sustainable development. In Crossing Boundaries: Innovative Learning for Sustainable Development in Higher Education (pp. 103–114). VAS. http://dspace.ou.nl/bitstream/1820/2409/1/Crossing Boundaries_Chapter05.pdf
Gregory, A., & Miller, S. (2014). Using systems thinking to educate for sustainability in a business school. Systems, 2(3), 313–327. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems2030313
Sharma, G., Greco, A., Grewatsch, S., & Bansal, P. (2022). COCREATING FORWARD: HOW RESEARCHERS AND MANAGERS CAN ADDRESS PROBLEMS TOGETHER. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 21(3), 350–368. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2021.0233
Williams, A., Kennedy, S., Philipp, F., & Whiteman, G. (2017). Systems thinking: A review of sustainability management research. Journal of Cleaner Production, 148, 866–881. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.02.002
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