Teaching organisational change management for sustainability: designing and delivering a course at the University of Leeds to better prepare future sustainability change agents

Abstract

A number of universities worldwide have created new courses and degrees or modified existing ones, as a response to the increasing interest by companies to hire sustainability literate graduates. However, many of such courses have been developed with a focus on 'hard' technocentric or managerial issues. The examples that have been published in academic journal have tended to be descriptive, and in only a limited number of cases have they been based on theories of teaching and learning. This paper presents the process of designing and delivering a new course on organisational change management for sustainability for the BA Environment and Business degree at the University of Leeds. The course was developed based on holism and a constructivist position to help deal with the complexities of sustainability and organisational change management. The course objective was to educate students as sustainability change agents by dealing with the complexities of sustainability and 'soft' issues in organisational change management. The process had three key elements: (1) the learning outcomes; (2) the course delivery; and (3) the course assessment (including feedback). During the process a number of challenges had to be overcome. The paper provides a more complete, systematic, robust, and focused approach to education for sustainable development, specifically on course design and delivery, by using theories of teaching and learning and linking the course aims, delivery, and assessment. The paper integrates education for sustainability development and corporate sustainability into a relatively new discipline, organisational change management for sustainability.