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Colleges and universities increasingly have the mandate and motivation to integrate sustainability into their curricula. The purpose of this paper is to share the strategy used at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and provide an evaluation of its success and guidance to others creating similar programs.

This article summarizes Penn’s Integrating Sustainability Across the Curriculum (ISAC) program. ISAC pairs Penn undergraduate research assistants with instructors in a collaborative effort to incorporate sustainability into courses.

In concert with other Penn initiatives (a course inventory, faculty discussion groups and a research network), ISAC increases Penn’s sustainability-related courses and creates dialogue regarding how various disciplines contribute to sustainability.

The program described in this article is replicable at other institutions. The authors demonstrate that the logistics of recruiting students and establishing the program are straightforward. Undergraduate students are on campus; their pay requirements are modest; and they are desirous of such research experiences.

The ISAC program inculcates a cultural and behavioral shift as students and faculty approach sustainability issues collaboratively, and it facilitates the development of a shared language of environmental sustainability. Such social implications are difficult to quantify, but are nonetheless valuable outcomes.

The faculty–student partnership used to facilitate the integration of sustainability into courses at Penn is original. The ISAC program provides a framework for engaging students and faculty in curriculum development around sustainability in a manner that benefits the student research assistants, the participating faculty and future students.

This paper aims to describe a two-stage sustainability curriculum assessment, providing tools and strategies for other faculty to use in implementing their own sustainability assessments.

In the first stage of the five-year curriculum assessment, the authors used an anonymous survey of sustainability faculty and requested data that would verify the survey’s self-reporting: updated sustainability syllabi, and answers to the question, “where have you integrated the three aspects of sustainability – biological systems, social systems, economic systems – into this course?” Finding that the self-reporting results did not match the evidence on the syllabi, the authors interrogated their methods from the faculty workshop trainings for sustainability curriculum transformation.

The authors’ workshops had not provided clear definitions for “sustainability” and the learning outcomes expected in sustainability courses. They had also not addressed the role of transformative pedagogy in teaching a holistic approach to sustainability. The research identified and transcended five key barriers to implementing sustainability curriculum: an over-reliance on faculty volunteers, unclear and unenforced expectations about sustainability implementations, a failure to recognize and circumvent institutional and philosophical barriers to teaching sustainability’s interdisciplinary approach through disciplinary-based curriculum, conceiving of sustainability pedagogy as transmission rather than transformation, and overlooking the ecology of educational systems as nested within the larger sociopolitical environment.

This study confirms the limitations of faculty self-reporting unless augmented with verifiable data.

Sustainability educators can use this research to devise curriculum or program assessment on their campuses: the mixed-methods approach to data collection, the inquiry into sustainability workshop trainings, the elements required on sustainability syllabi for building a coherent sustainability studies program, the resources for practicing a transformative sustainability pedagogy, and the barriers to sustainability implementation along with strategies for surmounting these barriers will all be of use.

This paper explores and combats root causes for an all-too-common disconnection between positive faculty self-assessment and syllabi that do not fully integrate sustainability across the disciplines.

Higher education institutions increasingly have gained momentum in integrating sustainability into university curricula. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the approval, implementation and management process of the new university-wide, general education requirement in sustainability at the University of Vermont (UVM). The intent is to provide a case study to inform other institutions seeking to create similar university-wide sustainability requirements.

The authors applied a process framework focused on institutional dynamics and values to analyze UVM’s success in instituting a sustainability requirement across the curriculum. These two frameworks can provide a more general application of this case study to other institutional contexts.

The case study suggests that in the context of a diverse disciplinary and administrative environment at a university, the strategic unfolding, approval and implementation of UVM’s university-wide, general education sustainability requirement can provide a general model for other universities seeking to embed sustainability across the curriculum.

It is uncommon for research universities with multiple professional schools to offer a university-wide requirement in sustainability. This case study analyzes the creation of a sustainability requirement at UVM by using a process framework to organize the complex, multi-stakeholder activities and events that eventually resulted in a successful curricular change. Thus, it is potentially instructive for institutions seeking to integrate a learning outcomes-based sustainability requirement into a university curriculum because it is generalizable to other institutions and pushes forward our understanding of institutional change.

There is a growing need to train and support educators to introduce or enhance aspects of sustainability into post-secondary curriculum. The authors provide an overview of integration of curricular sustainability development and education as well as related institutional leadership at the post-secondary level. Turning to educational development for sustainability education, the authors share tools and resources to support educators from any discipline, to introduce, integrate, and/or enhance sustainability in their course, program, or initiative. The authors found very few examples of workshops to post-secondary teachers. For one such example, the Sustainability Education Intensive, a three-day workshop that the authors designed and led at the University of British Columbia. The authors summarize the workshop aspects that two years of participants found helpful, and how workshop involvement affected them as sustainability educators. The authors encourage post-secondary institutions to provide support in the form of workshops, resources, and funding to help educators introduce or enhance aspects of sustainability into their courses and programs. Students are asking for this, and, as they are future leaders, it is important that educators address the numerous environmental, social and economic issues that demand attention.

The purpose of this article is to explore sustainability commitments’ potential implications for the curriculum of introductory economics courses. Universities have signed the Talloires Declaration, committing themselves to promoting students’ environmental literacy and ecological citizenship, thereby creating pressure to integrate sustainability across the curriculum.

A case study approach involving qualitative research methods and the three largest public universities in British Columbia, Canada, was used. As one component of a larger study, 11 of the 19 economists who delivered the course over the study period were interviewed. The theoretical framework was informed by ecological economics scholarship on how mainstream economic thought represents environment-economy linkages.

Findings suggest that universities’ sustainability commitments have not influenced principles of economics curriculum. Sustainability is not salient to lecturers; prospects that mainstream economics departments will integrate sustainability into curriculum in a timely manner without external pressure appear limited.

While institutions often enthusiastically report on courses that contribute to students’ ecological literacy, identifying curriculum that may confound student understanding of sustainability receives less emphasis. Introductory economics courses appear to merit scrutiny from this perspective.

About 40 per cent of North American university students take an introductory economics course, relatively few take more advanced economics courses. This course, thus, teaches many students economic theory and the economics profession’s approach to evaluating public policy, and has potential to contribute to knowledge of sustainability. Few studies examine how undergraduate economics curriculum addresses sustainability.

The purpose of this project is to provide an account of the student experience at a higher education institution known for its holistic approach to sustainability education.

A qualitative study was conducted at Green Mountain College (GMC), an environmental liberal arts school in Poultney, VT; 55 students participated in focus group interviews.

Students articulate that the most valuable gains that manifest at GMA are a variety of new capacities for science literacy, anthropological appreciation, the triple bottom line, a sense of place, systems, empathic decision-making and reasoning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and practical techniques supporting self-sufficiency. Prompting these emergent outcomes was a philosophy of practice at Green Mountain College, which included place-based techniques, empowerment, personalization, community ecology and charting polarity. Many students described their seeming metamorphosis as uncomfortable, and some felt isolated from the outside paradigm.

A key implication of the study’s findings is that in a holistic setting, the line between the informal and formal curriculum are significantly blurred and what is implicitly communicated through university practices and values is what most transforms the students’ explicit understanding of sustainability.

Sustainability education is far more than technique, far more than what a lone instructor can manifest in students. While the persistence of individual faculty members is important, this evidence suggests that the fertile conditions for transformation may be more fruitful when faculty members work together with a collective sense of responsibility and a well-articulated paradigm.

The advantage of the present study is that it examines the perceived impact of a focus on sustainability across curricula and school by considering the educational environment as a whole. The experiences of students from many different majors who are involved in a holistic, sustainability-infused curriculum at a university with a history of successful post-graduation job placements in the sustainability field are explored here.

Whereas the integration of sustainability into business schools has received increasing attention in recent years, the debate continues to be generic rather than recognising the peculiarities of the more quantitative sub disciplines such as accounting and finance which may of course be intimately linked to professional standards. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the extent to which sustainability is integrated into accounting and finance curricula in business schools, how, and to understand some of the challenges of doing so.

This paper presents the findings from a systematic form of literature review which draws on the previous literature about how sustainability is embedded into business school curricula and the challenges in doing so. A particular focus is placed on how the ways in which sustainability is integrated into accounting and finance curricula in business schools.

The paper demonstrates that accounting and finance lags behind other management disciplines in embedding sustainability and that institutional commitment is oftentimes a strong imperative for effective integration of sustainability.

This paper is a call to practitioners and researchers alike to explore new ways of integrating sustainability in the accounting and finance curricula, including working across boundaries to provide learning opportunities for future accountants, financial managers and generalist managers.

The paper offers an original analysis and synthesis of the literature in the context of the accounting and finance curricula in business schools, and proposed a conceptual framework to further develop sustainability education in the context of business schools.

Humans have immense impact on our environment and open and ongoing conversations are needed to generate informed actions toward sustainability. A sustainable future must grow from a changed mindset, one of critical thinking, problem-solving, and continuous learning and active practice. In higher education we are uniquely placed to share with students a sustainability-infused curriculum toward such a changed mindset. At Brookhaven College faculty self-selected to participate in a Teaching Sustainability Mini-Pilot during Fall semester 2018. The innovation was initiated to encourage students to become mindful of sustainability, inspired to get involved in sustainability efforts, and to become immersed in satisfactory real-world learning.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the process of creating and implementing sustainability competencies across a university illuminate dynamics of organizational change. The push to advance education for sustainable development in higher education will likely require transformation of existing policies and practices. A set of shared sustainability competencies could guide the integration of sustainability throughout an institution.

This paper reports on a case study of one US university, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) that developed institutional-level sustainability competencies. The process used to create and implement sustainability competencies is outlined, and key factors that influenced the associated organizational change are identified.

Very few US universities have institutional-level sustainability competencies. At UNH, drivers of organizational change such as overcoming disciplinary boundaries, developing a common vision and working from the bottom-up enabled the creation of institutional sustainability competencies, but the same processes were not enough to drive deeper implementation of the competencies.

This paper not only identifies the context-specific drivers of the development of institutional sustainability competencies, but also identifies universal themes that can be applied to other institutions embarking on a similar process. Additionally, this paper serves as a foundation for future research exploring how the process of creating institutional sustainability competencies may be linked to how effective they are in shaping subsequent sustainability education.

This study aims to analyze the extent to which sustainability and its related core aspects have been integrated in the curricula of Business Administration programs in Brazilian federal public universities over the past ten years.

A longitudinal exploratory study, with a descriptive scope, was carried out to evaluate the changes that have occurred in the curricula between the years 2011 and 2021. The analysis focused on the Pedagogical Project of the Business Administration programs offered by the Brazilian federal universities identified in the e-Ministry of Education’s (MEC) database of higher educational institutions and course registration. From the total number of federal universities identified in the e-MEC, about 90% were considered for the research.

The number of courses related to sustainability in Business Administration programs increased considerably in ten years. However, these courses still represent a low percentage of hours in the overall curriculum. Moreover, almost a third of Business Administration programs may produce graduates who have never addressed sustainability during their studies.

This research does not consider other aspects of the curriculum beyond courses, nor does it collect primary data that allows for inferences about the transversal nature of the theme.

This study contributes to monitoring the performance of Brazilian federal universities teaching sustainability and its related core aspects in Business Administration programs. This updated panorama may aid in the search for strategies to expand actions related to education for sustainability (EfS) in educational institutions (EIs).

This study presents some of the impacts of implementing the national environmental education curriculum guidelines. This study encourages discussion about EfS in Business Administration programs and in public EIs, which are important actors for promoting sustainable development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study that maps the courses related to sustainability in Business Administration programs at Brazilian federal public universities. This study offers the first responses to a broad and complex topic, of a region and disciplinary field, of which there are not many studies done, opening doors to subsequent investigations.