Sustainable Development and the responsibility of political, corporate and other actors for solving current social and environmental problems is one of the top priorities of international organizations such as the UN (UN Agenda 2030) as well as the European Union (EU Sustainable Development Strategy) and national and local governments. Higher Education institutions (HEI) play a crucial role in educating responsible future decision makers – in their role as managers, employees, consumers or investors. The UNESCO took up this idea by promoting concepts of “Education for Sustainability”. At the same time the PRME initiative of the UN Global Compact formulates six principles that higher education institutions should follow in order to support the formation of responsible future managers. There is an increasing number of teaching approaches that are designed with the aim of increasing awareness for CSR, changing attitudes and influencing behavior of individuals. However, tools for controlling the effectiveness of both the general approaches of higher education institutions as well as the specific teaching concepts are missing. The objective of the 3-year EFFORT project is therefore to develop tools and guidelines that support higher education institutions to increase the effectiveness and quality of sustainability-, ethics- and/or CSR-related teaching (in the following referred to as CSR-/sustainability-related teaching). The expected results consist of a tool for controlling the effectiveness of teaching formats (IO1), a Handbook/Toolbox presenting a systematically structured overview on currently existing innovative CSR-/sustainability-relatedd teaching concepts/courses (IO2), a self-evaluation tool allowing higher education institutions to benchmark themselves against other institutions (IO3), a number of new innovative teaching formats (IO4 - IO6) as well as a statistical analysis report (IO7) and a guideline (IO8) that shed light on which attributes of teaching concepts are most effective for educating responsible business leaders. Different target groups are addressed by the project. Main targets are higher education institutions (governing and administrative bodies, lecturers, technicians etc.) and their stakeholders (first and foremost the students, but also companies, regional/local/national governments, NGOs etc.). These target groups are addressed by facilitating high quality CSR-/sustainability-related education (HEI and other providers of vocational training and teaching) and increasing the awareness for sustainability challenges and the ways how to address them. The six partners are unified by the idea that CSR-/sustainability-related education is an important challenge of the future and need to be integrated holistically into policies and teaching of higher education institutions. They all have been active in different areas of sustainability education and partly have been working together in projects beforehand. Each partner bears a specific responsibility within the project, but is also co-responsible for the work packages and intellectual outputs generated by the other partners. The two associated partners (Principles of Resposnible Management Education (PRME) initiative and the Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability - Murdoch University) contribute with expert knowledge and for dissemination of the results. Regular project meetings should ensure the progress of the project and the contribution of each partner to the different intellectual outputs. Multiplier events serve as forums to communicate project results and to foster the further dissemination of knowledge. A number of other dissemination activities and follow-up activities ensure the long-term impact and sustainability of the project.
The objective of the project was to develop 8 interrelated instruments that support higher education institutions (HEIs) to increase the effectiveness and quality of their sustainability and responsibility related teaching. In particular, we wanted to: - Provide and disseminate innovative teaching formats that raise the interest of HEIs and motivate trainers and lecturers worldwide to implement them (IO2 & 4-6) - Provide a controlling tool that enables lecturers to control if their teaching format changed students’ behavioural intentions or variables predicting them in a way to foment responsible behaviour and motivate lecturers throughout the world to test the effectiveness of their courses (IO1) - Provide a statistical analysis report and guidelines that give insights on the effectiveness of different teaching formats and show factors that increase the effectiveness of teaching, hereby allowing trainers, lecturers and university staff to align teaching formats and contextual factors accordingly (IO7&8) - Provide a tool for the self-evaluation of “sustainability integration maturity” used by HEIs worldwide and initiate a discourse between and within HEIs about how to improve contextual factors for sustainability teaching (IO3)
Current environmental and social challenges, described by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Agenda 2030, require a change of behaviour of all actors in our society. Education plays an important role to encounter these challenges: The idea of “Education for Sustainable Development” has been identified as an important tool for achieving sustainable development. Education related to sustainability and responsibility equips students with the understanding of the importance of sustainability and potentially changes their attitudes and behaviours. It prepares them for their future role as employees, managers, consumers, investors, but also as voters/politicians and enables them to promote change, acting as change agents for a social, ecological and economic world of the future. Several universities realized their role to empower faculty, administrators, staff and students to be effective change agents and drivers of a more sustainable global society, and are beginning to integrate sustainability related issues into their profile and curricula. However, there is still a limited understanding about the effectiveness of sustainability and responsibility related teaching and which role the institutional environment plays.