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Redefining Sustainability in the Curriculum

Redefining sustainability, climate change and equality in the curriculum

Anne Tallontire (School of Earth and Environment), Thomas Cooper (Sustainability Service), William Young (School of Earth and Environment)

Project overview

We aim to generate an institutional understanding of sustainability, climate change and equality through Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). We will draw on existing ESD knowledge and practice and the University’s established Living Lab programme to create and test materials that support student education and educator professional development.

We have adopted Advance Higher Education & Quality Assurance Agency’s definition of ESD as “the process of creating curriculum structures and subject-relevant content to support and enact sustainable development”, where sustainable development is “an aspirational ongoing process of addressing social, environmental and economic concerns to create a better world” (2021: 8).

This Fellowship accelerates activities to embed sustainability, climate change and equality in the curriculum, working with Curriculum Redefined (CR) to enable the University to achieve its aspirations with respect to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and University’s Climate Plan.

Our vision for the Sustainable Curriculum is that the University of Leeds will become a leading institution for learning and teaching in sustainability and climate change, reflecting and supported by its world-leading research portfolio. We will provide our students with the knowledge and skills they need to have a positive impact in the world and to contribute solutions in our local community, and globally in an equitable and just way.

Key findings

  • We present our findings under three inter-related spaces that impact on the process of embedding sustainability into the curriculum: 
  • The Sustainability space is about the vision for sustainability, the knowledges and capabilities, the pedagogies used, and how these are integrated into a subject or indeed university life.   
  • The Education space has several themes that compete to shape the context including QAA/ Professional body accreditation, academic policies, assessment practice, professional development and student co-curricular opportunities. 
  • The Institutional space captures the broad ambitions of the organisation with the structures and processes that affect the time and recognition for staff to properly engage with sustainability in education to help the genuine efforts on the part of the university to foreground and prioritise sustainability. 

 

Our four case studies illustrate different ways that educators are integrating sustainability in their discipline: 

 

Case 1 explores the integration of sustainability into a final year capstone project in a STEM school. The module adopts a grand challenges approach, encouraging student-led group projects that address global issues. It highlights the need to scaffold skill development throughout the programme and development of a cross-cultural perspective.  Case 2 focuses on bringing interdisciplinary and critical thinking into a science masters programme, aiming to challenge conventional thinking. The case highlights the tensions and benefits of adopting this approach, including the students’ experience of a new take on their discipline and the skills they developed. 

  
Case 3 is about creating a broad but critical and understanding of sustainability for arts students who want to engage in sustainability in their careers but who need guidance on what this means in theory as well as practice.  A key challenge has been enabling colleagues to recognise the multiple dimensions of sustainability, and not just about the technical solutions.   Case 4 brings sustainability into an enterprise-focused level 3 STEM module that includes group work. The students are introduced to the Sustainable Development Goals to help identify projects and are introduced to the idea of “wicked problems” with no clear solutions.  The case reflects on module leader learning about sustainability alongside the students. 

 

 

Implications for practice

  • Education for Sustainable Development is a process of learning organisationally as well as on part of individual educators.  
  • There is a need to consider embedding processes at multiple levels, in context, recognising the multiple spaces that shape understanding and experience. 
  • There is a need for institutional direction and support to understand priorities for sustainability education, and its interface with complementary or competing themes, recognising that educational enhancement is a crowded space. 
  • There is not one approach to embedding sustainability, and there is a need to recognise diverse academic identities, and disciplinary approaches, whilst also highlighting the importance of engaging with inter-disciplinarity to capture the breadth of sustainability concepts and challenges. 
  • Common with other education enhancement innovation and initiatives, embedding sustainability requires sufficient space, resources and recognition within the organisation is vital. 
  • This includes spaces for collaborative learning such as networks or communities of practice to facilitate peer to peer learning. 

 

If you want to find out more details about this fellowship or what the next steps were upon completion please read the full snapshot  or contact Anne (A.M.Tallontire@leeds.ac.uk), Thomas (T.C.S.Cooper@leeds.ac.uk) or William (C.W.Young@leeds.ac.uk).

 

Project start date: July 2022