Embedding sustainability and mapping graduate outcomes without doing much extra work

‘Case Study: Embedding Sustainability and Mapping Graduate Outcomes in a BA Media and Communications Programme: Helping you comply without much extra work!’

Since the UK Sustainable Development Strategy made clear the role of education to ‘make ' “sustainability literacy” a core competency for professional graduates’ (HM Government, 2005), Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has become a pressing agenda for the learning and teaching community. For example, both the QAA (2013) and HEA (2014) have identified education for sustainable development as having, ‘broad relevance to the purposes of higher education and its wider context in society’. Sustainability is one of the central challenges facing the world in the twenty first century and universities are expected to play a key role in developing a principled response to current issues. The paper therefore offers a case study of how ESD was embedded into a Media module at Canterbury Christ Church University and how this might offer a basic toolkit for embedding and measuring student engagement with sustainability . It includes an analysis of data from a 2 year longitudinal study using a likert scale, to demonstrate how student perceptions of their learning are linked to HEA learning outcomes for ESF.

To support the HE community in the delivery of Education for Sustainable Development, the paper also explains the process of mapping graduate outcomes and adapting the curriculum to ensure coverage of HEA learning outcomes. By employing the HEA/QAA (2014) definition of ESD as ‘the process of equipping students with the knowledge and understanding, skills and attributes needed to work and live in a way that safeguards environmental, social and economic wellbeing ..’, the paper discusses how ESD can be linked to wider cross-curricula issues such as Employability, Internationalisation and Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, relevant to most modules in Higher Education.

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