Assessing sustainability in university curricula: Case studies from the university of leeds and the georgia institute of technology

Abstract

As more universities become interested in, and engaged with, sustainability, there has been a growing need to assess how their curricula addresses sustainable development and its myriad of issues. This book chapter presents an update of the Sustainability Tool for Assessing UNiversities’ Curricula Holistically (STAUNCH®), and its application in two universities: (1) the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech); and (2) the Bachelor and Master degrees from the Faculty of Business and the Faculty of Environment at the University of Leeds. The update includes the influence of the number of students enrolled in courses and the relative weight in credits of the courses in respect of the degrees. In addition, the tool provides graphs with information about which sustainability criteria are being most and least addressed. The curricula assessment can aid in better understanding the current status of a university’s courses and degrees and identifying how they could be changed to become more sustainability-oriented. While the curricula assessment at Georgia Tech and the University of Leeds show different approaches for curricula contribution to sustainability, the results indicate that STAUNCH® can be instrumental in identifying courses that more adequately cover the breadth and depth of sustainability issues and exhibit higher contributions to sustainability. Overall, STAUNCH® can provide a systematic method for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of a curriculum for the purpose of devising curriculum reform strategies to promote student sustainability learning. This can then help universities in making societies more sustainable.