Green Gown Awards 2020 - The University of Edinburgh - Finalist

Collaborations for Change: Integrating the SDGs in Further and Higher Education

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent important issues that universities across the world need to address. Students want opportunities to critically engage with these issues in their academic curriculum. The ‘European Students, Sustainability Auditing Project’ provided students with an experiential learning opportunity to understand how universities engage with social responsibility issues.  

A cohort of students from across Europe completed in audits of participating universities in England, Lithuania, Portugal, and Scotland. Participating students completed a training course on social responsibility auditing, participated in a five-day audit of a university, produced an audit report, and completed a reflective learning assignment to achieve academic credit.   

By developing a set of open educational resources, the three-year Erasmus + funded project, not only provided a unique learning opportunity for a diverse range of students to audit institutions, it also provided a forum for participating universities to share experiences of embedding social responsibility across the whole institution. 

Top 3 learnings:

1. Universities can always learn and benefit from each other, no matter how different the institutions are. 
2. Learning by doing is a powerful and impactful approach for student learning.  
3. Developing and implementing innovation in the academic curriculum take time, you need determination and the support of colleagues to see the value in what you are doing.