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SDSN Hosts Dialogue on Accelerating Education for the SDGs in Universities

By Dorothea Strüber

Universities and other higher education institutions play a critical role in helping society achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including through harnessing their learning and teaching functions to provide Education for the SDGs. However, the SDGs require deep and radical transformations in each country. Incremental approaches will not be enough to tackle the urgent and complex challenges outlined by the 2030 Agenda. In order to have a leading role in these transformations, universities will also need to evolve.

Universities have developed sophisticated systems to deliver high-quality education and research while remaining independent from political and economic changes. These characteristics often go hand in hand with structural constraints to rapid change. However, the SDGs can offer a framework to guide profound institutional evolution. Many higher education institutions are already embracing the SDGs as a source of transformation and reinvention. But is the sector, as a whole, acting fast enough? And are the changes sufficiently profound, given the pace and scale of change and the timeline signaled by the SDGs?

The discussion focused on Chapter four of our recently launched guide Accelerating Education for the SDGs in Universities , and featured a fantastic set of speakers:

Otto Scharmer touched upon the importance of creating transformational change from within the institutional context, emphasizing six points in particular:

  1. People: Responsibility of educators to make a change and instill the notion of change among students.
  2. Power of place: Student-centric learning and believing in dormant capacities of the student body that can be activated in the right context and environment.
  3. Practice fields: Safe environment allowing students to engage in new ways of operating. Social arts are essential. Deep dialogue, i.e. coaching sessions.
  4. Partners: Local, global, regional ecosystem of partners.
  5. Pathways: Radical innovation needs a space to develop. It needs a new operating system, a second layer, which tends to happen first at the periphery. A supporting infrastructure is needed to support this and prevent the “immune reaction” of the old system.
  6. Pedagogy: Based on the principles of an open mind, open heart, open will: Encouraging compassion. We need to develop capacities that engage and engage deeper conditions that capture energy.

Dr. Scharmer emphasized the need to build new architectures of connection, to cultivate a capacity to sense the system from an outside perspective in order to change it. He also highlighted that we need “action confidence” and build the capacity to step into it. In light of the current situation, there is a need to be more intentional about the disruption and develop capacity to activate our own potential. This, according to Dr. Scharmer, can be achieved by democratizing access to transformation literacy.

Wendy Purcell highlighted that higher education matters now more than ever as we battle inequities in our societies. Here, the SDGs can serve as a beacon and strategic direction to move forward. They need to be used as the lens through which the higher education sector looks at what it is doing, not as an additional task on a to-do list. All areas of community service, research and innovation, teaching and learning, need to be connected to it, until it becomes an automatization of how things are done. Embracing the SDGs can help reimagine the purpose and lead through uncertainty, driving academic excellence, all while helping sustain institutions in the face of disruption and global challenges. The Guide can be a helpful document for the why and the how. Delivering the SDGs needs to become part of our academic mission.

Luce Beaulieu shared her experience at the CIRODD Cluster, which has fully integrated the SDGs in their modus operandi on a deep level. One of their projects, the Summer School in Societal Transformation, will take place in 2021. It addresses many challenges in the operational system in universities, while its multi-stakeholder program targets mostly SDG 11 and is a way to experiment with a new operating system for universities bringing together different disciplines. It has the potential to transform the way that sustainability is taught in universities and might be scaled up, adapted to different sectors, organizations, with the potential to ultimately modify curricula in different universities. CIRODD has decided to transform itself within its current funding cycle until 2021, integrating the SDGs in all of its operations. Transforming their governance, they brought on a mixed stakeholder committee with actors from the field to co-govern the center adding their knowledge and needs.

Sarah Mendelson highlighted the most important paradigm shift to be a different conception of sustainability. It is not just an environmental agenda, but a political, social, environmental, and economic one too. One major trend is that siloes between national and international actions are dwindling. Carnegie Mellon issued a voluntary university review in September 2020 as an iterative process, looking at education and research. The challenge is to make people understand that it is “not only the provost’s agenda”, but everyone’s else’s agenda too. In trying to create Communities of Practice by using the SDGs within and across universities, there is a need to show the “SDG effect” - that lives are in fact improving when using the SDGs as a framework.

Amelia Clarke from the University of Waterloo shared her experience on how the SDGs can be institutionalized. Starting with a campus sustainability management system as a cycle of continuous improvement, the University of Waterloo has institutionalized this as a policy across all four areas of university engagement on the SDGs.

We have collated an online repository of case studies from universities that are accelerating education on the SDGs.