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The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of the curriculum auditing tool Sustainability Tool for Auditing University Curricula in Higher Education (STAUNCH©), which was designed to audit the education for sustainability and global citizenship content of higher education curricula. The Welsh Assembly Government aspires to incorporate sustainability across all sectors and required an audit of all higher education curricula within Wales. The paper also discusses responses to the auditing process, findings at an institutional and national level and proposes recommendations for improvements.

The University of Wales, Newport, provides the case study to test the validity of the STAUNCH© software.

The quality and effectiveness of the curriculum content was not identified by the audit. The audit identified what the curriculum offered but did not necessarily reflect that studied by students. Modules offered on more than one course were awarded credit within the “cross‐cutting” criteria of the audit and this distorted the final results. The audit enabled curriculum managers to identify programmes of study which exhibited strengths and limitations in this area. Utilising a common auditing tool across the Welsh higher education sector allows for future developments to be collective and collaborative.

A general consensus of opinion from a network of Welsh higher education institutions regarding any future use of this auditing tool is currently one of uncertainty as far as any validity the tool may bring to driving the sustainability agenda forward. Alterations to the STAUNCH© software and auditing process are proposed if possible future audits are to be more effective. Nevertheless, within a relatively short time span education for sustainable development and global citizenship within Welsh higher education is gaining momentum. Amendments have been made to university documentation, staff‐training initiatives developed and the potential impact of curriculum development in this area is beginning to be realised.

This paper discusses the application of a new sustainability curriculum‐auditing tool and the validity of the tool in progressing sustainability within the higher education sector.

Higher education institutions play a crucial role in pursuing a more sustainable future. Research in sustainable development education (SDE) has grown dramatically in the last two decades because of its importance and global influence. In many universities, sustainability training is restricted to courses, is segregated from the study, and is not connected with sustainable campus operations. Thus, sustainability education is often addressed separately. The study adopted the descriptive-analytical method, and the keywords were adapted and extracted from the United Nations' definition of sustainability and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, in addition to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 framework. This study examined whether sustainability elements are integrated into Imam Abdulrahman bin Faisal University's curricula (i.e. courses and programs). We were particularly interested in learning how various academic fields integrate sustainability into their curricula. The study results indicated no elective or mandatory courses were designed for sustainable education in the university plan and showed a low degree of integration within the university curricula. For universities, incorporating SDE capabilities within the curriculum has practical ramifications. The curriculum review found that the courses focused chiefly on environmental concerns but enhanced the depth of coverage. Some approaches assist university leaders in devising curricula reforms to promote sustainability learning, providing students with opportunities to reflect on the topic, and bridging the gap between the activities being done at a university to foster sustainability and student perception of what needs to be achieved.

This paper aims to present key findings from an inquiry into engineering accreditation and curricula renewal. The research attempted to ascertain conceptions of requisite sustainability themes among engineering academics and professionals. The paper also reflects on the potential role of professional engineering institutions (PEIs) in embedding sustainability through their programme accreditation guidelines and wider implications in terms of rapid curricula renewal.

This research comprised an International Engineering Academic Workshop held during the 2010 International Symposium on Engineering Education in Ireland, on “accreditation and sustainable engineering”. This built on the findings of a literature review that was distributed prior to the workshop. Data collection included individual questionnaires administered during the workshop, and notes scribed by workshop participants.

The literature review highlighted a wide range of perspectives across and within engineering disciplines, regarding what sustainability/sustainable development (SD) themes should be incorporated into engineering curricula, and regarding language and terminology. This was also reflected in the workshop discussions. Notwithstanding this diversity, clusters of sustainability themes and priority considerations were distilled from the literature review and workshop. These related to resources, technology, values, ethics, inter‐ and intra‐generational equity, transdisciplinarity, and systems and complex thinking. Themes related to environmental and economic knowledge and skills received less attention by workshop participants than represented in the literature.

This paper provides an appreciation of the diversity of opinion regarding priority sustainability themes for engineering curricula, among a group of self‐selected engineering academics who have a common interest in education for SD. It also provides some insights and caveats on how these themes might be rapidly integrated into engineering curricula.

This paper aims to evaluate how transformative learning is key to innovating sustainability education in the built environment in the region’s universities, in addition to reporting on the research project undertaken to integrate sustainability thinking and practice into engineering/built environment curricula in Asia-Pacific universities.

The project drew from the experiences of academics in built environment programmes and espoused a collaborative inquiry process wherein the role of the industry was vital. A literature review focusing on sustainability integration into curricula was followed by a workshop which brought together academic and industry participants.

The general direction of education for sustainability is moving increasingly towards integration and innovation. However, the slow progress of integration of sustainability in the built environment curricula may have been due in part to the outcome/practice-led approach of built environment education, which is the hallmark of the discipline and lends to a largely discipline-based curriculum framework.

The project focused only on the curricula of university programmes and courses taught in the participating Asia-Pacific universities and institutions.

This paper highlights how the framework for the proposed curriculum guide focusing primarily on built environment programmes and courses can provide guidance for potential application in other higher education institutions.

Much is written about embedding sustainability and education in built environment curricula. However, little analysis, application and collaborative work in Asia-Pacific universities have taken place. This paper considers the value of transformative learning in the innovation of the predominantly discipline-based engineering/built environment programmes for sustainability.

The authors describe the challenges and opportunities associated with developing an interdisciplinary sustainability programme in an emerging economy and illustrate how these are addressed through the approach taken for the development of the first postgraduate programme (MSc and PhD) in sustainability science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The purpose of this paper is to outline an approach that has a potential for application in other parts of Latin America and perhaps more broadly in other world regions sharing some of the same challenges and opportunities as found in Mexico.

The implemented collaborative framework enabled a transformation of disciplinary research and teaching at UNAM into a postgraduate programme designed to generate cutting-edge educational and research capabilities. The approach to curriculum and programme design emphasized the process and methodological framework for curriculum development as much as the outcome itself. It entailed three primary elements: theory on collaborative processes; the curriculum design approach; and a formative and summative evaluation.

Several of the challenges faced were related to the nature of the institution (mainly because of the complexity of its organization and the emphasis in maintaining disciplinary boundaries), as well as to the curriculum development and design approach (acceptance of a competency-based programme appropriate for the MSc but considered restrictive for the PhD). The experience the authors relate in this paper exemplifies how to cope with such challenges. The approach enabled the emergence of a shared vision that was appropriated by all the participants. This ultimately empowered them in the presentation of the curriculum to their disciplinary peers. Furthermore, the approach facilitated the creation of a programme that remained salient along the process, while increasingly gained legitimacy and credibility among the academic community.

In Mexico, the number of sustainability practitioners and scientists is still insufficient, and there is a clear lack of capacities in key themes and tools. UNAM combines a strong scientific tradition and a foundational mandate to serve both the country and humanity and is, thus, a natural platform for developing a higher education programme in sustainability science. The approach taken in the development of UNAM’s programme has useful lessons for the development of similar programmes in other developing nations facing similar educational and institutional challenges.

This model not only resulted in an innovative and novel programme in sustainability education but also, in the process, strengthened the competencies of diverse stakeholders through a systematic collaborative framework that fosters sustainability as a social learning process. Such experience illustrates the advantages of implementing a collaborative approach to enable the emergence of a critical mass capable to handle the diversity presupposed by a curriculum in sustainability science. It also shows how such a collaborative process can be implemented to overcome the limited resources, lack of experience in sustainability education and strong disciplinary focus that hampers the advancement of higher education in institutions similar to UNAM.

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.

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.

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.

This paper aims to develop an improved and harmonized approach to interdisciplinarity in education for sustainable development (ESD)within higher education institutions (HEIs), focusing on maximizing the mobilization of students from all academic disciplines. An attempt is made to reconcile varying strategies for the implementation of interdisciplinary ESD content in HEIs, studying the relative merit and benefit of those strategies and crafting a new approach to combining them, where possible.

This work relies on a robust review and analysis of existing literature proposals on the implementation of ESD in HEIs to elaborate an integrated approach to interdisciplinarity. Specifically, a scoping literature review is applied, analyzing the existing approaches to ESD in HEIs as well as the challenges observed in their implementation. Using this theoretical framework, this paper evaluates the compatibility and efficiency of the approaches currently implemented. Based on this analysis, an integrative approach is outlined, building upon and combining existing proposals.

Building on existing literature, this study identifies two main trends for interdisciplinarity in ESD in HEIs: integration into existing disciplinary curricula and new, stand-alone ESD curricula. This paper suggests adopting the two approaches simultaneously, to reach students from all academic disciplines, especially those with minimal exposure to ESD through their own discipline. Furthermore, this paper stresses that these dual curricula strategies should be combined with further interdisciplinary research initiatives as well as extensive leveraging of technology and e-learning.

This study bridges the gap between diverging visions for ESD in HEIs, harmonizing strategies from the literature to outline a new, multilateral strategy. Furthermore, it extensively studies the need for increased engagement into ESD of students from underrepresented disciplines, including the humanities. This engagement has been little addressed in the literature, rendering the proposed approach original insofar as it outlines the ways to improve current approaches to ESD in HEIs.

This purpose of this study is to explore the integration of the sustainable development concept and goals into the curriculum of higher education studies using the example of three faculties of the University of Belgrade.

A qualitative content analysis has been applied on two levels: the evaluation of the sustainability of courses starting from the criteria defined using the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (ASHE, 2017), and the analysis of the outcomes defined in the curricula of subjects within the three faculties using the UNESCO learning objectives related to selected sustainable development goals (SDGs) as a criteria.

While the largest number of courses were analyzed from the Faculty of Architecture, the highest proportion of sustainability courses was found in the Faculty of Security Studies. Both study areas reflect a stronger interdisciplinary orientation, although it should be strengthened in the case of the Andragogy study program. Based on the experience of the Faculty of Architecture, the courses implemented by linking theory and practice may significantly contribute to achieving the LOs and to implementing the education for sustainable development. At the University of Belgrade, strategic documents are missing that would encourage and oblige the faculties to apply the concept of sustainability.

This is the first study to apply this type of curricula analysis at the University of Belgrade. It is performed by teachers from the university, coming from different disciplinary fields but oriented towards an interdisciplinary perspective. Although performed in three specific study areas within a single university, the identified gaps and trends may be useful for planning interventions toward accelerating the implementation of SDGs in the higher education curricula.