Good Practice Exchange - Sustainability in the curriculum

My name is Jack Christian. I teach three different courses all of which are related to Ethics and Sustainability Accounting, the Responsible Accountant or Accounting, Society and the Environment. I run on one of my courses a 'Sustainability Walk' which is a bit of a novelty in the Business School to actually take the students out and make them walk anywhere. And I guess the idea came from.. a little bit of the history of it. I was actually recording birds in the centre of Manchester for the Greater Manchester Recorder for a time and I developed this little walk. This was even before I came to work at the Business School. And then I also worked with the Ramblers Association trying to encourage people to go walking, people from deprived areas if you like, because it is good for health and it is good for socialising, stuff like that. And then we had Mind, Body and Spirit Week here at the University and I thought 'I'll take some of the lecturers out'. They enjoyed it so much I thought I'd share it with the students. And I got given a course to lead in about 2009 and I thought 'I'll take the students out on that particular walk to show them the effects of industrialization. The walk itself, we used to leave from the old Business School, but essentially we follow a canal out of town so we see actually three different canals, which is where industrialization started in Manchester. I think that that is a usual place to start when we are talking about unsustainability because we started becoming more unsustainable as we moved into cities and became more industrialised, as I see it. From there we cut across Manchester. We see a huge number of train lines or line where trains used to be. And again that is part of the history of industrialisation in Manchester. And we pass the Metro link which is good because this is the modern world. Perhaps Manchester, with all sorts of regeneration, sites of regeneration, we see waste in the cities, this particular recycling site we take the students by and I think that this enables them to see what the effects of industrialisation are and if you don't think about sustainability, what you can be left with post-industrialisation. There are other interesting questions involved in it as well like the Metro link. I say well 'should we be bringing people into the city or should we be taking work out to where the people are to cut down on CO2 omissions?' and things like that. Lots and lots of opportunities to talk to the students and get them to think about the impact of industrialisation and what we should be doing to make life more sustainable. Sustainability is a word, words are just signifiers, and they don't tell what a thing is that they are signifying. It's a concept. It is in your mind. I think if you go out and look at it, it becomes real and that way it is much more likely to be something that you feel, you smell, you understand it. One of the problems that we have in the University when I talk to colleagues about sustainability it that the first thing they say it 'what is it?' And people don't know what it is because it is a word that has been banded around and captured by so many institutions and so many different ways. I think some experience of watching the waste of the city be piled up prior to being recycled, which is not pretty, gives us some idea of what being unsustainable is about. Equally, it is amazing how many are quite amused when they see, because I often point them out, the various birds that we see. I always remember the Chinese students in particular when they found out that we had geese of the canals. They all wanted their picture taken with a goose! I thought that was quite funny really but on the other side of that was one the same students saying 'I never thought I would see something in Manchester or in the UK' which is quite sad because what they were looking at was the waste tip I was talking about before. Somehow, they imagined that being a developed nation we had got rid of these problems. But we haven't and we have got to face up to them or work out ways to face them. I think that going for the walk is more memorable. It is unusual. They don't do that kind of thing very much so to go out for a walk and discuss things it'll be captured in their minds. It'll stay in their memories and hopefully, in the future, when they are starting a new project of their own as a project manager they will think 'hang on a minute, what happens at the end of this?' Something called 'cradle to cradle' is something of a buzzword in sustainability where we try and design into new products and processes a way out of them; how can we recycle and reuse the things we use? And I think that if I can give them something real to make them think that or of the consequences of not doing that them I think hopefully they are more likely to actually do something to prevent any subsequent mess. I think sustainability awareness is really important. There are all manner of problems that arise out of unsustainable behaviour and that is why it is important that future managers, which are the people I teach, understand that these things have got to be controlled or at least reined in so that we can share things more equitably around the world and avoid the tensions that might build up. Current postgraduate student: I think this is really useful because this is kind of combining the theoretical that we have done in the class with the practice things. Because, especially for international students, the reason for us to come here is to try and know the history of this country and the history of the education stuff. So the walk around the city is really useful because we can see what is going on and like people trying to sort the pollution or bad affects like what we got before. I think it gives us ideas of how we can innovate it and how we can make it sustainable in the future.