Combining the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of teaching sustainability: the case of the business school academics

Abstract

Faculty are key to bringing about ‘bottom-up’ change for sustainability education. Yet, research is still needed on the backgrounds and experiences of change agents in universities and the challenges they face. This study focuses on the marketing discipline, a field fraught with epistemological tensions in seeking to integrate sustainability, mainly revolving around profit maximisation and continuous consumption while living on a planet with finite resources. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sustainability marketing academics in Australasia, Europe and North America. The contribution of this paper lies in the development of a sustainability educator typology linking why and how integration occurs. The sustainability ‘transformer’ wishes to engage in transformational learning, changing student mindsets, the ‘thinker’ wants to encourage critical thinking to bring about the discussion of worldviews, while the ‘actioner’ hopes ‘learning by doing’ (community projects) will provide an appreciation for sustainability. We discuss implications for those disciplines which struggle with philosophical tensions and colleague resistance to the integration of sustainability in the form of suggestions for professional development (i.e. creation of positive nature experiences) and pedagogical approaches (critical, transformative and community-service learning).

Keywords:

• Education for sustainable development
• educators
• identity
• curriculum
• faculty

Notes on Contributors

This is paper is based on Joya A. Kemper PhD thesis. Paul W. Ballantine and C. Michael Hall were her supervisors who aided in developing the research idea, theoretical development, conceptualization and editing of the manuscript. Joya A. Kemper collected and analysed the data, and wrote the manuscript.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the participation of the interviewees who made this work possible and the reviewers for helping us to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.