Abstract
This chapter outlines the current context of universities, one that challenges them to integrate Education for Sustainability (EfS) into the curriculum of all courses and subject areas and proposes a model to help guide universities in achieving this goal. For a university to embark on any major change to its curriculum it is proposed that two issues are need to considered to improve the chances of the success of the project. These are an understanding of processes of organizational change, because shifting a curriculum is a very major change for those that design and teach curricula, and the other is an understanding of academic identity, because it is individual academics within their departments who will be the people who need to conceptualise what the new curriculum will look like and design subjects and courses to meet the university’s goals. The model has as its phases: Goal setting; Discovery; Discipline-based planning; Cross-discipline coordination; Design and Implementation; and Coordination and Progress Reporting. These phases build upon each other to promote the success of achieving the university’s goals. The chapter proposes a framework that universities and other tertiary institutions facing this challenge could apply. Thus, it does not look at the specifics of what should or should not be in such a curriculum, but rather it explores and proposes a model for the process an institution could apply to achieve the goal of embedding Education for Sustainability across the whole curriculum.
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- 1.
The term ‘subject’ is used to refer to a single unit of study that is part of a larger program, such as a degree. In some places the term ‘course’ or ‘unit’ may refer to what is termed a subject here.
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Chambers, D.P. (2013). A Discipline-Based Model for Embedding Sustainability in University Curricula. In: Caeiro, S., Filho, W., Jabbour, C., Azeiteiro, U. (eds) Sustainability Assessment Tools in Higher Education Institutions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02375-5_17
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