New podcast considers sustainability in higher education

In our latest podcast – introduced by our very own veteran podcaster Dr Kerr Castle – QAA Membership Quality Specialist Lucy Leake is joined by Charlotte Bonner, CEO of the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges, and Dr Rehema White, senior lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews and chair of Learning for Sustainability Scotland, who has led a QAA-funded Collaborative Enhancement Project on 'Monitoring and evaluating ESD in higher education'.

"Some of this is about recognising the core purpose of our education system," says Charlotte. "We know that there are roughly seven million learners in post-16 education across the country… We need to make sure that their education is equipping them well for their futures, for their lives… If we do this well with regard to sustainability, we are going to be much better equipped to solve the sustainability challenges that we face."

She adds that when she speaks of "sustainability" she's not only referring to the environmental issues we face but is also flagging our broader social, cultural and economic challenges.

"Many people go into education to help support their future careers," she says. "Any job has the potential to be done in a way that is harmful to sustainability or in a way that is positive and helpful to sustainability. Developing the workforce of the future so that's something more positive is definitely a role that education has."

She stresses that higher education's various roles – from research and development to supporting the health and prosperity of local communities – can be done in ways which exacerbate the problems we face or which help us solve them.

"Education is about creating a better future," she insists. "Educational institutions should be engaging with the sustainability agenda because it has the ability to transform everything they do in a way that's hugely positive."

Raheem agrees that our institutions should be "orienting themselves towards more sustainable futures" – as places where people "come together from different parts of the world to explore the kinds of futures we might want to have and what kinds of pathways we might pursue to get there".

She emphasises that "this is far more than just about producing some topics in the classroom – this is a real ethos around what we want our higher education institutions to be".

She underlines current concerns about the accuracy of public information and the denial of expert knowledge in the era of social media and artificial intelligence, and argues that education for sustainable development can underpin the development of students' political literacies and their skills in understanding sources of content and promoting the critical assessment of its integrity.

"Employers want graduates who have the capacity for the kind of world we live in now, which is one in which there are multiple forms of information coming at people – which requires their critical capacities to be able to interrogate and synthesise across that," she explains. "They require people who are resilient and adapt to different contexts, who can work collaboratively, who can be future-thinking, and who can recognise that the world just now is unpredictable. They need to come out of universities with the competencies to be able to imagine and respond to different kinds of futures… It's not just about ensuring that people learn about sustainability, it's about ensuring that they learn for sustainability... focusing on not just what's in the curriculum but on the pedagogies, the kinds of assessment and the engagement with real-world issues that our students have."

How to tune in

All of our QAA podcasts can be found on Buzzsprout and other popular streaming platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music – where you can explore our full catalogue of lively conversations with colleagues from across our sector – whose recent topics have included approaches to awarding gaps, academic integrity, artificial intelligence, evaluation, competence-based education, work-based learning, embedding employability, the TEF, student engagement and the Quality Code – as well as a fascinating conversation on the state of higher education between our Chief Executive Vicki Stott and the great Paul Greatrix.