Dominic Pates, Eleanor Sims and Arthur Shearlaw
In a recent address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the Secretary General argued that, on the current trajectory, we have a ‘rendezvous with climate disaster’ without a profound change of course across global society (Guterres, 2022). Today’s students face graduating into a deeply troubled world that will impact all businesses, practices and professions. The workers and leaders of tomorrow will find themselves having to confront these issues, whether they wish to or not. City’s President has stated that ‘the biggest impact we can make on sustainability is through the way we educate our students’ (Finkelstein, 2022). In order to support City students having access to a broad-based and constructive educational opportunity to learn more about key issues in sustainability and the climate crisis, efforts are underway to develop an interdisciplinary module at the university.
This module, currently dubbed ‘City 2030’, aims to support students to develop the necessary skills and understandings for contributing to a sustainable, fair and just society in a changing climate. Due to the complex and wide-ranging nature of the challenge, it is being designed as interdisciplinary rather than belonging to one subject domain. Perceived benefits of educational interdisciplinarity include increased student motivation, development of critical thinking and the fostering of transferable skills (Weller and Appleby, 2021). This means that colleagues will contribute their own disciplinary expertise to the module as well as gaining new perspectives from other fields that, in turn, can act to inform or cross-pollinate their own disciplinary work.
In line with the theme of the conference, this workshop proposes bringing staff and students together to start work on a first draft on how the ‘City 2030’ syllabus might look. Similar to a mini-hackathon, it aims to bring individuals from a variety of disciplines and perspectives together to work collaboratively in groups to generate ideas for what topics the module could contain, and how it could be taught. Healy et al (2014) note that institutions that implement curricular co-design initiatives see significant benefits for both staff and students. Students already working on related issues with City’s Sustainability team will be invited to participate and to play an active part in the group discussions with staff from different disciplines.
The workshop will draw on a UNESCO-produced (2017) set of learning objectives aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and centre around group discussions on topic ideas and module structure. As a follow-on activity, participants will be invited to register interest for a longer storyboarding workshop that draws on an approach to learning design derived from Laurillard’s Conversational Framework (2012). The future workshop will take outputs from this session to build the next steps towards a full set of teaching, learning and assessment activities.
Participants will: – gain experience of curriculum co-design in an interdisciplinary and student-partnered context – explore a provided set of SDG-aligned learning objectives to support their syllabus discussions – contribute ideas and perspectives on what topics a climate change/sustainability module should include – discuss sustainability matters with other staff and students from varied disciplinary backgrounds Outline of activities:
1. [10 mins] Introduction/task set up
2. [15 mins] Exploration of UNESCO’s SDG learning objectives
3. [20 mins] Syllabus topic idea generation and ordering
4. [10 mins] Feedback and wrapup
Attendees may wish to read this UNESCO document before the workshop runs. This document provides a set of learning objectives focused around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) There is no expectation for attendees to read this in advance of the session.
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Guterres, A (2022). Secretary-General’s Address to the General Assembly. [Web] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2022-09-20/secretary-generals-address-the-general-assembly-trilingual-delivered-follows-scroll-further-down-for-all-english-and-all-french (retrieved 31/03/23)
Finkelstein, A (2022). Comment at President’s Forum Event. [Web] https://staffhub.city.ac.uk/senior-leadership-team-blog/2022/presidents-staff-forum-28-september (retrieved 31/03/23)
Healy, M; Flint, A; Harrington, K (2014). Engagement Through Partnership: Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Advance HE. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/engagement-through-partnership-students-partners-learning-and-teaching-higher (retrieved 09/05/23)
Laurillard, D (2012). Teaching as A Design Science. Routledge.
UNESCO (2017). Education for Sustainable Development Goals Learning Objectives. [PDF].
Weller, M; Appleby, M (2021). What are the benefits of interdisciplinary study? [Web] https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education-development/what-are-the-benefits-interdisciplinary-study (retrieved 31/03/23)
