Teaching sustainability: complexity and compromises

Abstract

Purpose

Sustainability is one of the leading challenges of our age, and higher education plays a vital role in supporting the implementation of sustainability initiatives. There has been substantial progress in business schools introducing sustainability into courses with extant literature detailing case studies of sustainability education and student perceptions of their learning. The purpose of this paper is to address the gap in literature from educators' perspectives on their experiences of introducing sustainability teaching using specific teaching tools for sustainability.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper presents a case study on a sustainability teaching tool, WikiRate, that was embedded into business and management courses at seven higher education institutions from across the globe. Interviews were conducted after course delivery to gain insights into the practical challenges of designing and implementing a sustainability education activity.

Findings

The findings show that educators perceive sustainability as a complex issue, presenting a challenge to teaching in university systems whose normative curricula are rooted in instrumental problem-solving. Furthermore, educators described challenges to their own learning in order to implement sustainability into curricula including the need for compromises and adaptions.

Originality/value

This empirical study reports on educators' experiences embedding sustainability into their courses through an innovative teaching tool, WikiRate. This paper has implications for reframing how we can approach sustainability education and presents discussion ways to teach complexity without reduction or simplification.

Citation

Anastasiadis, S., Perkiss, S., Dean, B.A., Bayerlein, L., Gonzalez-Perez, M.A., Wersun, A., Acosta, P., Jun, H. and Gibbons, B. (2021), "Teaching sustainability: complexity and compromises", Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 272-286. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-02-2020-0029