EFFORT – Effectiveness Of Responsibility Teaching
The UNESCO took up the idea of shaping our world through how we educate the individuals of tomorrow by promoting the concepts of “Education for Sustainability”. At the same time the PRME initiative of the UN Global Compact formulates six principles that higher education institutions should follow in order to support the formation of responsible future managers. There is an increasing number of teaching approaches that are designed with the aim of increasing awareness for CSR, changing attitudes and influencing behaviour of individuals. However, tools for controlling the effectiveness of both the general approaches of higher education institutions as well as the specific teaching concepts are missing.
The objective of the 3-year EFFORT project is therefore to develop tools and guidelines that support higher education institutions to increase the effectiveness and quality of sustainability-, ethics- and/or CSR-related teaching (in the following referred to as CSR-/sustainability-related teaching). The expected results consist of a tool for controlling the effectiveness of teaching formats (IO1), a Handbook/Toolbox presenting a systematically structured overview on currently existing innovative CSR-/sustainability-related teaching concepts/courses (IO2), a self-evaluation tool allowing higher education institutions to benchmark themselves against other institutions (IO3), a number of new innovative teaching formats (IO4 – IO6) as well as a statistical analysis report (IO7) and a guideline (IO8) that shed light on which attributes of teaching concepts are most effective for educating responsible business leaders.
Different target groups are addressed by the project. Main targets are higher education institutions (governing and administrative bodies, lecturers, technicians etc.) and their stakeholders (first and foremost the students, but also companies, regional/local/national governments, NGOs etc.). These target groups are addressed by facilitating high quality CSR-/sustainability-related education (HEI and other providers of vocational training and teaching) and increasing the awareness for sustainability challenges and the ways how to address them.
The six partners are unified by the idea that CSR-/sustainability-related education is an important challenge of the future and need to be integrated holistically into policies and teaching of higher education institutions. They all have been active in different areas of sustainability education and partly have been working together in projects beforehand. Each partner bears a specific responsibility within the project, but is also co-responsible for the work packages and intellectual outputs generated by the other partners. The two associated partners (Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative and the Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability – Murdoch University) contribute with expert knowledge and for dissemination of the results.
Regular project meetings should ensure the progress of the project and the contribution of each partner to the different intellectual outputs.
