Education for Sustainable Development: How Can Changes in Local Practices Help Address Global Challenges

The emergence of highly complex sustainability challenges in modern society has led to the necessity of searching for more effective approaches to education for sustainable development. Research has shown that reflection leads toward more profound levels of engagement with respect to sustainable actions. Therefore, higher education has a role to play in stimulating reflection in light of sustainability. Art-based techniques, which have not been included alongside traditional teaching methods, have begun to gain the attention of researchers and teachers in higher education as they produce a deeper impact and involvement and can have a positive influence on the minds and hearts of the students. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that poetry can contribute to integrating the arts and humanities in management education. The potential effect of poetry on business management majors is being explored as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility course. Poetry has considerable potential as an innovative approach to teach sustainability, but it is rather unusual in business education. Poetry was chosen as an enabler for reflection and emotions. This original teaching project was followed by a research project relying on reflective assignments. A rereading of Walter Benjamin's Illuminations from the perspective of sustainability studies was a source of inspiration, in particular “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “The Storyteller” and “Unpacking My Library.” The paper assumes that Benjamin's ideas relate to a slow journey involving “awakening,” “wisdom” and “in a process,” three elements that are at the core of promoting a sustainability mindset. The research project consisted of four reflection assignments students had to comply with: reading and interpreting poetry; searching for a poem which would be most appropriate for the discussed sustainability topic; creating their own poem and reflecting on the whole task. The research took place in the second semester of 2020 and first semester of 2021, all in COVID-19 pandemic context. Students' participation was not mandatory, but the majority joined. Their perceptions and impressions reinforce the existing knowledge about the emotional power of poetry to encourage reflection. The results show that poetry plays a relevant role in encouraging future managers to develop a frame of mind that incorporates sustainability and responsibility. Business students are open to this approach because it adds a new and unexpected dimension to their studies. Despite the urge to integrate reflections, this is still an exception for the majority of management courses. The results suggest that poetry is a relevant instrument to promote a more sustainable mindset among future managers. Paradoxically, by emphasizing a slow journey, i.e., allowing time for integrating reflective practices, a transition toward sustainability in daily managerial processes can be accelerated.

Complex sustainability challenges may never be fully solved, rather requiring continuous, adaptive, and reflexive responses over time. Engagement of this nature departs from well-structured problems that entail expected solutions; here, focus shifts toward ill-structured or ill-defined issues characterized by wickedness. In the context of complex challenges, inadequate or absent framing has performative implications on action. By overlooking the value of framing, eventual responses may not only fall short; they may even displace, prolong, or exacerbate situations by further entrenching unsustainability. In educational settings, we know little about how curriculum designs support challenge framing, and how students experience and learn framing processes. In this paper we explore a transdisciplinary “Challenge Lab” (C-Lab) curriculum from a perspective of challenge framing. When considering framing in higher education, we turn to the agenda in education for, as and with sustainable development to be problem-solving, solutions-seeking or challenge-driven. We introduce framing as a boundary object for transformative praxis, where sustainability is held to be complex and contextual. This study is qualitative and case-based, designed to illuminate processes of and experiences into sustainability challenge framing in a transdisciplinary learning setting. Methodologically, we draw from student reflective diaries that span the duration of a curriculum design. We structure our results with the support of three consecutive lenses for understanding “curriculum”: intended, enacted, and experienced curriculum. First, we present and describe a C-Lab approach at the level of ambition and design. Here it is positioned as a student-centered space, process, and institutional configuration, working with framing and re-framing complex sustainability challenges in context. Second, we present a particular C-Lab curriculum design that unfolded in 2020. Third, we illustrate the lived experiences and practical realities of participating in C-Lab as students and as teachers. We reflect upon dilemmas that accompany challenge framing in C-Lab and discuss the methodological implications of this study. Finally, we point toward fruitful research avenues that may extend understandings of challenge framing in higher education.