The Future of Education

Over the last decade, sustainability has received increasing attention in business education (Figueiró & Raufflet, 2015). Main reason for this attention is the worldwide acknowledgement of environmental degradation caused by human actions and business activities. Because the issues stem from variety of sources, there is no doubt that integrated approaches and solutions are necessary to overcome ever increasing environmental problems. In the same way, academic culture needs to evolve in its ability to support necessary responses at large scale and in real time to the progressively accelerating complex grand challenges of contemporary life. Building the capacity of our colleges, universities, and most importantly, students to respond to the challenges of sustainable development thus requires that we rethink our academic institutions and teaching strategies. This transformation will be particularly important in the business schools. In fact, the need for curriculum changes in business education has been highlighted by several educators and researchers in the literature (Figueiró & Raufflet, 2015). There are different approaches pursued by business schools to achieve this change, which indicates that a number of schools are already trying to embed sustainability into their curriculum. While some are developing interesting new interdisciplinary offerings with a great effort, many others are integrating some cases or contents into their existing courses as a starting point because of the difficulty of redesigning entirely new offerings (Painter-Morland et al., 2016). This study shares several case studies and interdisciplinary approaches in teaching sustainability to business students. In these courses, students explore the complex business environment and the relationships organizations have with civil society, the natural environment, and each other. This study demonstrates different methods of teaching complicated sustainability issues to business students. There is no doubt that through research and teaching associated with sustainability, higher education can be transformed with deliberate institutional evolution and large-scale academic reorganization. Only this way, it could be possible to tackle some of the most intractable challenges of our era.

Keywords: Business education; Business sustainability; Business school curriculum; Triple-bottom-line;

References
[1] Figueiró, P. S., & Raufflet, E. (2015). Sustainability in higher education: a systematic review with focus on management education. Journal of Cleaner Production, 106, 22-33.
[2] Painter-Morland, M., Sabet, E., Molthan-Hill, P., Goworek, H., & de Leeuw, S. (2016). Beyond the curriculum: Integrating sustainability into business schools. Journal of Business Ethics, 139(4), 737-754.