Research Cluster: Education & Methods

Transforming Education: Exploring Innovative Approaches and New Methods for Research and Teaching at CBS

Education & Methods is about teaching and learning processes. It is about how critical thinking can be promoted and how skills and competencies can best be taught.

In the context of the research fields outlined above and the further introduction of new B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs, the cluster “Education & Methods” is of particular importance. In addition to the implementation of integrated curricula for sustainable management and digitisation, educational institutions are faced with the challenge of implementing new methods for research and teaching as well as finding instruments that document learning success in a sustainable manner.

DAAD-BMBF “German University in Cairo (GUC): Towards excellence and international visibility in research and teaching”

The focus of this one-year research project was to examine the process of defining a prioritised research agenda that addresses the relevance gap in management as a method of academic branding for academics. This is done by assessing the institutional as well as individual factors that influence the prioritisation of the research agenda for the management scientist.

In addition, the project aimed at the exchange and stronger networking of the two university partners. In December 2019, CBS President Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Fröhlich and IB Dean Prof. Dr. Markus Raueiser spoke at the “Responsible Management Symposium” at the GUC to which the two partners had invited as part of the CBS delegation’s visit to Cairo.

Visit of the CBS delegation (Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Fröhlich, Prof. Dr. Markus Raueiser, Marina Schmitz, Silvia Damme) to the German University in Cairo in December 2019.

ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnerships 2019: 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.

Education & Methods: Early childhood education for sustainability topics

While the issue of sustainability has become an established part of the educational curriculum in many schools and other educational institutions, it is more difficult to place it in early childhood educational institutions (kindergartens, day care centres).

Instead of imparting knowledge and professional skills, early childhood education must take a more playful approach to teaching sustainability issues. Best Practice analysis, a concrete, immediately implementable concept was developed for imparting sustainability knowledge (using the example of waste separation) in early childhood educational institutions. The illustration on the right shows a partial result of the business project: a section of the Pixie book, for a child-oriented description of correct waste separation Cologne, 15 May 2020.