A Study Into : The Embedding of Environmental Sustainability Awareness into the Existing Curriculum of a Business and Law Faculty of an Australian University

Climate change, global warming, rising sea levels, ice cap melting, carbon taxes and trading schemes etc. are all big environmental issues that confront the modern world. Universities are now trying to ensure that their students graduate with an understanding of environmental sustainability regardless of their field of expertise. This study looks at 176 separate business and law units from five schools within an Australian University to see how they embed environmental sustainability into their existing curriculums. It also examines how environmental sustainability fits into the scaffolding of the main Bachelor of Commerce degree and how each school plays it’s part into the overall development of graduates’ understanding of environmental sustainability. At the end of 2009, 2010 & 2011 all unit chairs in the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University were asked if and how environmental sustainability was included in their units. A very impressive 51% of unit chairs replied positively and of the remainder, the vast majority of these believed environmental sustainability was not applicable to their unit. However, measuring the effectiveness of the introduction of environmental sustainability into the curriculum is extremely difficult and this is often done by student assessment methods. Only 11% of the units actually carried out assessment of the students’ knowledge of environmental sustainability. These findings have implications for course and curriculum designers who are trying to effectively embed environmental sustainability into the scaffolding of their existing educational courses