Sustainable Course Research Articles

An overview of management education for sustainability in Asia

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the holistic picture of sustainability curricula in Asian higher education. Design/methodology/approach – Content analysis was conducted based on Asian management education for sustainability in higher education. Online courses arrangement, teaching methods, instructors’ educational background and cross-referencing data between triple bottom line and sustainability courses have been investigated. Findings – The paper provides empirical insights about the current state of sustainability education in Asia. The results show that there is an opportunity for interdisciplinary integration, as there are imbalanced sustainability courses offered by business, science and engineering schools. It also suggests that Asian universities should add an international connection and active promotion of sustainability education on their Web sites. Research limitations/implications – Findings are based on web-based sustainability -related courses. Future research could apply method of case study to do a deeper study. Practical implications – The paper provides an overview of Asian management education for sustainability and curricula analysis through our research, and that this will further assist in the development of interdisciplinary integration in Asian management education for sustainability. Originality/value – This paper is the first attempt to gain better understanding of sustainability-related courses offered in leading business/management colleges in Asia.

Su1332 Long-Term Outcome of Patients With Crohn's Disease in Deep Remission: C-Reactive Protein Normalization Predicting Better Outcomes

15.73 yrs (95% CI 13.03-18.44), p=0.539]. Immunosuppressant therapies, including antiTNFs, were used more frequently in those with baseline inflammatory disease; however, there was no difference in the median time to initiation of an anti-TNF across the 3 groups. Conclusion: B2/B3 disease at diagnosis is commonly reported as a predictor of an ongoing aggressive disease course. However, while these cases often have surgery at an early time point; they appear not to have a sustained aggressive disease course afterward. This subgroup may have a long pre-clinical disease course prior to their initial presentation.

Harrisburg City Council Partners with Widener Law Students on Sustainable Ordinances

Sustainable development is an issue of increasing interest as Americans now realize the great importance and dire need of highly functional, well-planned, stable communities. Widener University School of Law-Harrisburg Professor John C. Dernbach prepares students in his Sustainability Law and Practice course for a changing world by having them look at problems as opportunities. While Professor Dernbach is distinguished in his own right, it is his students’ work that is really worth talking about this time. As part of the sustainability course, six students drafted amendments to current ordinances in the City of Harrisburg - ordinances they presented to City officials - with the hope of helping the City become a more sustainable community. This article summarizes the work of Professor Dernbach’s students and provides the proposed ordinances in full as appendices. The proposed ordinances focus on sustainable building materials, recycling, composting, stormwater and sewer management, permeable paving, and outdoor food trucks. Student participants included Kayla Rosencrans, Pia Aklian, Myer Messinger, Travis Petty, Mark Wendaur, and Matthew Fine.Sustainable development is commonly defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While not discussed in the students’ work, the practice of having law school students give back to their community epitomizes this ethos.

Educating the Aware, Informed and Action-Oriented Sustainable Citizen

The Introduction to Sustainability course at the University of Iowa seeks to educate the aware, informed and action-oriented sustainable citizen. A phenomenographic analysis and retrospective pretest were utilized to determine how students formed conceptions of sustainability as a result of completing the course. The study indicated that student conceptions of sustainability can be characterized by the “aware, informed and action-oriented” spectrum. In written reflections following service-learning experiences, students provided ample examples of “awareness moments” where they expressed a first encounter with a wicked problem. In these same reflections, students provided examples of being able to move beyond awareness toward an action-orientation. Many students that were called to action through a service-learning experience expressed hesitation regarding their level of knowledge regarding certain issues. But, many students with this hesitation decided their next action step would be to become more informed. Therefore, even when confronted by a sustainability issue or dilemma that students felt were beyond their knowledge level, they many times expressed an action pathway to become more informed. By challenging student thought processes and exposing the immediate need for global change, the Introduction to Sustainability course empowered students to become aware, informed, and action-oriented sustainable citizens.

Successes and snags of a sustainability course in higher education

By means of an action-research methodological approach, this paper analyses the accomplishments and challenges of a university-wide course that offers sustainability theory and practice to help students adopt pro-sustainability behaviours and analyse public policies that seek to transform urban areas into truly sustainable places. Through the lens of the four pillars of sustainability - environmental, social, economic, and cultural - the course explores various topics related to sustainability (e.g., energy and water conservation; housing design and construction; transportation; social and biological diversity; and war and peace) but pays particular attention to the themes of education; food production; and intentional communities. Despite the popularity of the course, it has encountered various ideological and logistical challenges that at times have imposed significant constraints on the course's trajectory. The paper examines ways of overcoming these obstacles.

The future of automotive lithium-ion battery recycling: Charting a sustainable course

This paper looks ahead, beyond the projected large-scale market penetration of vehicles containing advanced batteries, to the time when the spent batteries will be ready for final disposition. It describes a working system for recycling, using lead–acid battery recycling as a model. Recycling of automotive lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries is more complicated and not yet established because few end-of-life batteries will need recycling for another decade. There is thus the opportunity now to obviate some of the technical, economic, and institutional roadblocks that might arise. The paper considers what actions can be started now to avoid the impediments to recycling and ensure that economical and sustainable options are available at the end of the batteries' useful life.

Civil Engineering Faculty Incorporation of Sustainability in Courses and Relation to Sustainability Beliefs

AbstractProfessional practice within civil and environmental engineering demands that practitioners within the field have knowledge of sustainability. Engineering education has attempted to reflect this standard, as noted in statements of expected student outcomes from ABET. Yet, the degree of integration of sustainability in engineering education is varied and inconsistent across and within institutions of higher learning. In order to address this issue, this study investigates one of the potential barriers to integrating sustainability into undergraduate engineering classrooms: educators’ beliefs regarding sustainability. The two-fold relationship between civil engineering faculty beliefs about sustainability and actual practice of integrating and incorporating sustainability within their classrooms is investigated in this study. Using thematic analysis of semistructured interview data; we present three personas that emerged from the data set. These personas represent characteristics shared among partic...

Teaching and learning sustainability: An assessment of the curriculum content and structure of sustainability degree programs in higher education

Sustainability degree programs in higher education have proliferated with the emergence of sustainability as a recognized academic field. This study evaluated the curricula of English-language programs granting degrees in sustainability by analyzing 27 bachelor's and 27 master's sustainability programs based on their (1) curricular structure, in terms of the proportion of core versus elective courses, (2) breadth of the core courses, which were classified into one of ten disciplinary categories, and (3) specific disciplinary content of core course subjects. We found that core courses made up the majority of both curricula, although bachelor's programs were more flexible than master's. Within these core courses, sustainability and social sciences were found in more than 85 % of both bachelor's and master's programs, as were natural sciences at the bachelor's level. Less than half of sustainability master's programs required a natural science course, which on average made up just 2 % of required course credits. No text was widely used in core sustainability courses. Our findings demonstrate that there is a wide divergence between the content of programs granting degrees in sustainability; many do not appear to be achieving the integration of natural and social sciences proposed in the literature. We believe that some shared foundations between programs is necessary for sustainability to develop into a mature scientific program that is recognizable across universities and understood by academics, employers, and civil society, and is effective in training the next generation of sustainability scholars and scientists.

A Sustainable Course in Research Mentoring

In this report, we describe a six-year experience (2007-2012) in a single CTSA awardee institution on the development, implementation and evaluation of a hybrid online mentoring curriculum that is applicable to CTSA trainees at various levels (graduate, medical students, and junior faculty) of career training. The curriculum offers convenience, engagement, and financial sustainability. Overall, we found high levels of satisfaction with the curriculum and mentoring experience among both protégés and mentors. Qualitative data showed remarkable consensus of 14 of the 15 domains of mentoring that form the framework of the mentoring curriculum: (1) accessibility, (2) selectivity, (3) engagement/support, (4) teaching/training, (5) clarity of performance/expectations, (6) sponsorship/sharing power judiciously, (7) demystifying the system (academia), (8) challenging/encouraging risk taking, (9) affirming, (10) providing exposure/visibility, (11) being an intentional role model, (12) protecting, (13) providing feedback, (14) self-disclosure, and lastly (15) counseling, with the fifteenth domain "counseling" being the most controversial. Quantitative survey data of both mentors and protégés indicated a high degree of overall satisfaction in their mentor-protégé dyad with 86% (59) of protégés and 86% (55) of mentors responding good or excellent to the "quality of time spent." Mentors and protégés were most satisfied in the area of research, with 93% (62) of protégés and 96% (57) of mentors finding discussions in research very to somewhat useful for their own career advancement. Along with wide acceptability, this format is a useful option for institutions where face-to-face time is limited and education budgets are lean.

Comparison of Environmental Responsibility of Construction Management Students Based on Exposure to Sustainability in Curricula and on Campus

Universities around the world are focusing more on sustainability, not only in their academic education but also in the overall administration of their campuses. Sustainability is becoming more important for both students and the employers hiring them upon graduation. Specifically in programs such as architecture, engineering, and construction management (CM), the focus on environmental responsibility is increasing faster due to increased regulations, codes of ethics, and increasing opportunities for practicing green building knowledge upon graduation. While the efforts both at the curriculum level and at the whole campus level to promote sustainability have been increasing, it is not yet fully determined how effective these approaches are in advancing the environmental responsibility of students. This study presents the results of a survey to measure the environmental responsibility of subjects from three different groups of students studying CM at two different universities with different records of sustainability initiatives. The results of this study reveal that CM programs can significantly strengthen students’ environmental responsibility by adding sustainability course(s) into higher education curricula. This study was unable to identify a positive and linear relationship between a university’s sustainability record and its students’ environmental responsibility.

Profiling Sustainability Curriculum in AACSB Schools

This article describes the landscape of Sustainability Curriculum being used across the Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)–accredited schools in the United States on the basis of a non-probabilistic sample ( n = 119). Using hierarchical cluster analysis, four clusters were obtained based on sustainability-related courses in management, marketing, entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, information systems/information technology, strategy, globalization, communication, and miscellaneous. Cluster 1 had uniform dispersion on sustainability courses in all business courses except marketing. Clusters 2 and 4 were the largest ones with most sustainability courses in the management area, whereas, Cluster 3 had weak, but uniform, dispersion of sustainability courses in most business disciplines. Based on their characteristics and strength of dispersion among 10 business subject areas, these were labeled as Sustainability Prominent, Sustainability Moderate, Sustainability Meek, and Sustainability Quiescent.

Addressing sustainability in hotel management education: designing a curriculum based on input from key stakeholders

This paper reports on combining generic reference points that can be distilled from literature with the analysis of 18 face-to-face interviews with relevant stakeholders as input for designing a sustainability course within a (higher education) hotel management curriculum. The train of thought presented here shows that by using this input as design parameters for a curriculum, education could serve as a crucial catalyst and change agent for a societal transition towards sustainable development. It shows that this is also true and relevant, maybe even especially, for the hospitality industry. Subsequently, it is explained that for the specific hotel management education addressed in this paper to fulfil this role, the sustainability course incorporated in its curriculum needs to combine various components and approaches. It needs to provide students with an ethical framework that helps them develop a reflective attitude towards their own and others' actions and decisions. This framework needs to focus on generic values and norms, but also on envisioning practical social, ecological and economic consequences. Therefore, it also needs to help students acquire the knowledge and develop the skills required to envision and discuss these consequences, also with involved stakeholders, and (jointly) devise context-dependent solutions.

Development of electric vehicle: public perception and attitude, the Malaysian approach

The rising energy demand has compounded with fuel subsidies and a volatility of oil prices has set the transport sector on an unsustainable course and posed a threat to national energy security in Malaysia. Moreover, it contributes significantly to the green house gas (GHG) emission and causes health as well as environmental damages. Green transport is a feasible transportation technology capable of setting the transportation sector in a sustainable course. The focus of this study is to develop an electric car driven by an electrical motor powered by 84.6 kWh of LiFePO 4 battery with an evaporative cooling battery thermal management system (EC-BThMS). The EC-BThMS has been able to keep the battery temperature in the range of 25°C to 40°C. The justification of the introduction of green vehicle was made by the investigation of public preference and attitude towards green transport. The results of the survey indicate that 54% of respondents seriously like to purchase environmental friendly green transport.

Introducing sustainability to interior design students through industry collaboration

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to introduce a sustainability course to interior design students and explore how working with industry could address challenges with integrating sustainability education into and ensuring student motivation in non-studio courses. Design/methodology/approach – This is a case study presenting qualitative evaluation from the 15-week “IAED 342 Sustainable Design for Interiors” course with a sample of 98 third-year interior architecture students at Bilkent University, Turkey. Findings – The findings were analyzed from the perspectives of two processes learning and working with industry. The results revealed that an active learning environment and industry collaboration positively influenced students' awareness of sustainable design, increased their ability to integrate sustainability knowledge to design studio projects and improved academic outcomes. Originality/value – This study is a unique effort by the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Bilkent University by being the first to introduce a sustainability course and create a responsive and social learning environment through industry collaboration. The results of the study highlighted that better outcomes are achieved by working directly with industry than by performing theoretical exercises.

Rivers as municipal infrastructure: Demand for environmental services in informal settlements along an Indonesian river

In many developing world cities, where municipal infrastructure lags urban growth, lower-income communities may compensate by relying on local waterways to meet basic needs for water, sanitation, and recreational space. Access to these environmental services is possible because residents settle in floodplains, but thus entails elevated exposure to several water-related hazards, especially flooding. We examine this complex relationship in the neighborhoods of Bukit Duri and Kampung Melayu on the Ciliwung River in Jakarta, Indonesia. Based on a spatially referenced household survey, we analyze and map the patterns of use of six environmental services provided by the river: direct sanitary use, recreation, harvesting plants, groundwater use, solid waste disposal, and sewage disposal. Using spatial interpolation and regression methods, we identify the most probable areas where services are being used and analyze possible influences on this behavior. We find that proximity to the river significantly influences households’ behavior toward the river, as do infrastructure-related variables and neighborhing households’ behavior, while household demographic factors appear less significant. These results indicate that many households rely on multiple environmental services, and that residents most reliant on these services are also at greater risk of water-related hazards, service disruption (e.g., a decline in water quality), and potentially, eviction. This pattern of floodplain development is prevalent in many low-income countries, and a better understanding of how informal settlements rely on environmental services can be used to assess their vulnerabilities and inform more sustainable courses of development.

Transforming a Research Project into Teaching RS Intensive Undergraduate Course

The session will focus on describing the process of creating and running a research and scholarship intensive, undergraduate course in Environmental Science and Biology. Ecological Sustainability course (EVPP 378/BIOL 379) was taught first time as a RS course in Spring 2013. The course teaches students a process of doing a natural, experimental, hypotheses-driven science. The activities include conducting an experiment, collecting and analyzing data, critical reading and discussion of peer-reviewed journal articles, and communicating the results of the research project with the public (e.g., K-12 students). The session will present the whole experience with this new course and what may be improved. Also there will be discussion on how the course improves students' analytical thinking, writing skills, and ability to communicate science more effectively. There will also be discussion on how a research project in the area of the instructor's expertise can be incorporated into designing and teaching a RS course.

Assessing sustainability education in a transdisciplinary undergraduate course focused on real‐world problem solving

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present the results of a classroom assessment aimed at determining the extent to which key sustainability competencies develop in students during an introductory transdisciplinary sustainability course.Design/methodology/approachThe paper summarizes three previously identified key sustainability competencies and describes teaching methodologies used in the introductory course described here to foster these competencies in students. The development of these competencies over the course of one semester is assessed using a pre‐/post‐test based on case analyses. The implications of these findings for academic sustainability programs are discussed.FindingsBased on the assessment used here, the sustainability competencies developed differently in students with different disciplinary affiliations as a result of the introductory sustainability course. Business majors did not improve any of the key competencies, sustainability majors improved systems thinking competence only, and sustainability minors who were majoring in another traditional discipline improved all competencies.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to undergraduate sustainability education by shedding light on how sustainability might best be incorporated into specific academic programs. This information may help create more effective sustainability courses and academic programs, which may maintain the viability of current sustainability programs and promote the institutionalization of sustainability in higher education in general.

The Brazilian Developmentalist State in Historical Perspective: Revisiting the 1950s in Light of Today's Challenges

The paper assesses the debates between influential writers and decision makers involved in the fast-paced industrialization Brazil embarked upon in the 1950s. Although the period was shaped by high rates of economic growth championed by charismatic nationalist leaders, disagreements pertaining to the role and configuration of the developmental state gave rise to a hybrid agenda of development which combined both liberalizing and interventionist strategies. Through precarious political compromises, persuasion, and a high degree of demiurgic ambition, the federal Brazilian state advanced a bold project of material and symbolic modernization of important sectors of the national society. In the end, however, a combination of internal disputes and a long legacy of socio-spatial inequalities prevented the achievement of a sustainable course of national development, thus bequeathing the country several unanswered issues which gain further relevance today as Brazil assumes a relevant position within the realms of an ever more complex and interdependent global economy.

The rise of China vs. the logic of strategy

As the rest of the world worries about what a future might look like under Chinese supremacy, Edward Luttwak worries about China's own future prospects. Applying the logic of strategy for which he is well known, Luttwak argues that the most populous nation on Earth--and its second largest economy--may be headed for a fall. For any country whose rising strength cannot go unnoticed, the universal logic of strategy allows only military or economic growth. But China is pursuing both goals simultaneously. Its military buildup and assertive foreign policy have already stirred up resistance among its neighbors, just three of whom--India, Japan, and Vietnam--together outnumber China in population and wealth. Unless China's leaders check their own ambitions, a host of countries, which are already forming tacit military coalitions, will start to impose economic restrictions as well. Chinese leaders will find it difficult to choose between pursuing economic prosperity and increasing China's military strength. Such a change would be hard to explain to public opinion. Moreover, Chinese leaders would have to end their reliance on ancient strategic texts such as Sun Tzu's Art of War. While these guides might have helped in diplomatic and military conflicts within China itself, their tactics--such as deliberately provoking crises to force negotiations--turned China's neighbors into foes. To avoid arousing the world's enmity further, Luttwak advises, Chinese leaders would be wise to pursue a more sustainable course of economic growth combined with increasing military and diplomatic restraint.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM MCMASTER’S FIRST CRACK AT A SUSTAINABILITY COURSE

While many courses at McMaster University cover some sustainability related material, 2012 saw the initiation of a new special project: To develop and deliver McMaster's first dedicated sustainability course, complete with community involvement, project-based learning, and registration open to students across all faculties. Five areas are discussed where we've seen huge opportunity for innovation in higher education: avenues for community involvement, cross-faculty enrollment, innovative teaching formats, project-based learning (both in terms of project success rates and benefits to students), and learning objectives (specifically as developed for sustainability education).