Motivating Sustainability Literacy

Abstract

An understanding of sustainability, ‘sustainability literacy’, is an increasingly important competency for all professionals, no matter what their area of specialism. This paper explores the motivation for teaching computing students about sustainability and raising student awareness of the issues involved. There are a number of related drivers for its inclusion in the curriculum and some of these motivators are discussed. The paper raises the issue of computing students’ interest in sustainability, or lack thereof. An account is provided of an ‘active learning’ approach which has been used at Coventry. In this students were given a problem, contextualised in the IT industry, and were required to find sustainability material, for themselves, to support their proposed solution. This approach was successful overall with students deriving relevant proposals, finding appropriate sustainability material and therefore developing an understanding of sustainability issues, as related to the IT industry.