The Curriculum Change team as part of oikos Graz was established with the start of the winter term 2020 and currently has eight active members. Our main goal is to increase the inclusion of sustainability topics in all study programs. In the following paragraphs we summarize the activity of our team. 

Firstly, we are still collaborating with the RCE (Regional Centre of Expertise Graz-Styria) at the university of Graz which supports our common goal: sustainable education. Together we established a new free elective module at the university, the “basic module sustainability” which is open to all students and study programs. It aims to educate the students in sustainable development and its different dimensions, starting from the basics. 

In the Winter Term of 2020/21 the new module “basic module sustainability” started with more than 370 students taking part. The lecture was held in a hybrid setting with around 100 students on-site. The rest was able to follow online.

Furthermore, we are continuing to hold the oikos lecture, substituting the last lecture in the course “introduction to business administration”. There we teach about sustainable business and economy to first year students. For Summer Term 21 we could switch to holding the lecture online. Through these lectures we reach a great number of students aiming to be future entrepreneurs and economists. There are several hundred students enrolled every year:

• Winter Term 20: 954 students
• Summer Term 21: 442 students
• Winter Term 21: 695 students

The lecture units were held by two oikees and are obligatory to any first-year students starting with Business Administration, Economics or Sociology studies. The content of the lecture unit is relevant for the final exam.

Student Survey

In the Summer Term 21 the Curriculum Change Team at oikos Graz started its survey “Transforming education at the University of Graz towards sustainability”. With a total of sixteen questions the study aims to examine the students’ needs towards sustainability in their study programmes. 

Through a broadly spread marketing campaign we reached more than 500 students and received 333 complete answers. The results of this study can be found here (german). We are starting lobbying activities at the faculty level of the University of Graz. This is going to be an exciting journey itself, so we will create a new story for this as soon as we progress!

To promote our activities we hosted a social media campaign for curriculum change education and experiences. This was established as a cooperation of oikos Copenhagen, Lisbon, Vienna and Graz through an initiative at the NexGenLead. In this joint project we created videos highlighting our achievements in curriculum change at our universities. 

One of oikos’ main goals is to integrate sustainability into universities’ curricula, so this campaign was about explaining what curriculum change is and to give some insights into our curriculum projects and how oikos Graz fosters the transformation of economics and management studies. Also, followers were encouraged to take part in curriculum change by taking part in a short survey, to talk to professors and fellow students to raise awareness for the importance of integrating sustainability into studies, to join student initiatives that represent the needs of students and are promoting educational transformation projects or to participate in existing academic offers on sustainability, to show interest in them and give feedback. 

Relationship with oikos International

As we were part of the CC squad from the first moment, we could use the opportunity to connect with other chapters to develop joint projects. Furthermore, the monthly meetings are a great way to exchange ideas and learn from each other. We are very thankful for all of the inputs we received either from other chapters or from the international team that facilitates the sessions to ensure a productive and healthy atmosphere. 

Education for schools 

Another major interest of the team is education at schools. The aim is to bring sustainability education and insights into school classes. This also gives us the chance to present sustainable study programs to the pupils to widen their perspectives after school.

• First session online for two German school classes (15-17 years old) in June 2021 was held by two oikees.

• “Klimabildung für Schulen” (Education on Climate for Schools) partnership with Climate Change Centre Austria, Scientists for Future, Students Association for Sustainability and University of Graz (Wegener Center) is a program where we support by helping to set up the lectures and facilitating them. 
• -Part of Sustainability Team at University of Graz
  1) Sustainable Design Thinking Challenge (Cooperation with SAP, SAP next-gen, University of Graz, Graz Holding, Energie Steiermark and ÖH Graz) was a three day online team event to create disruptive solutions for local sustainability challenges. The student participants could earn two ECTS for their respective study programs and it was implemented as part of the sustainability days that were initiated by oikos Graz in 2016 and are now highly supported by the University itself..  

→ We won the green gown award in 2020 for this project!
2)COPERNICUS Alliance (European Network on Higher Education for Sustainable Development

The oikos St. Gallen curriculum change team consists of Luna, Robin, Daniel, Sandro and Carina as the project head. In the following, we hope to give you an insight into our work of the last year. The overview will be structured like our separate team responsibilities: Assessment year (Carina), IWÖ (Luna and Robin), Open Evenings (Daniel), Sustainable Finance (Sandro) and StartWeek (Luna). 

During our summer holidays, Anna, former President of oikos St. Gallen, had a conversation about curriculum change in the assessment year with the president of University of St. Gallen’s (HSG) Student union. To better understand the context: The assessment year stands for the first two semesters at our university, where every student has to pass the same exams in order to finally decide for a specific major in the third semester. There is currently a single lecture about sustainability in one of five obligatory courses in the entire year. Apart from this, we did not notice the topic being mentioned once in the entire year, sustainability is most certainly not integrated as well as it could be. The president of the Student Union liked our idea, so, in July, Carina organized a first meeting with him, Anna and two representatives of HSG’s institute for economy and the environment (IWÖ). After this pitch he agreed to introduce her to the heads of the assessment as well as one of HSG’s vice presidents. The second meeting in November and the pitch to convince all these stakeholders for our vision for change for the assessment required a lot of preparation, we put the final presentation in the appendix of this mail. Carina presented to them our evidence that there is so much demand for more sustainability in the curriculum and, to our own surprise, they agreed with every single point and had a lively discussion on how to make as many little (and later bigger) changes as possible!

Luna and Robin are closely working together with the IWÖ and started to scan all the course fact sheets to find out whether courses already implemented sustainability in any way. This being very time intensive and the necessity to repeat the procedure every year lead them to the idea to start the More is more – Sustain the change campaign: At the moment they are designing a survey for all professors to clarify whether they teach or mention sustainability in their courses. When this survey is completed, it will be sent per email to all professors together with an invitation to the Open Evenings taking place in March 2022.

The Open Evenings Event in March 2021 to spark the conversation about curriculum change was a success but the question of how to drive actual change from a student perspective still remained. That is why, in collaboration with the oikos St. Gallen sustainability week, we will focus even more on the invitation of stakeholders such as program managers and professors. Here, Daniel is coordinating the contact with the sustainability week and the speakers.

A Business administration bachelor finance professor reached out to us respectively the oikos St. Gallen sustainable finance team because he is trying to replace one of the case studies in his course with one about a sustainable company. Apart from searching for this case study, Sandro and the sustainable finance team explored the opportunity to create an own, student-made sustainable finance course. However, a new course needs to be registered over a year before its implementation which is why this idea seemed to be rather unrealistic for our one-year team members.

HSG offers the “Managing Climate Solutions” certificate, where groups of Master students help shape our university’s infrastructure in a sustainable way. One of these groups recently contacted us and asked for our support to convince the administration of the StartWeek to address sustainability in their case study (all assessment students participate in this week at the beginning of their studies and work on a case study about a global challenge). Luna will have a meeting with them soon.

There is a lot more background organization and administration necessary in order to make all of these projects possible. We are constantly receiving many opportunities for curriculum change and our strategy seems to have developed in a very emergent way. As a group of students with limited time resources we always try to focus only on the options that show that are most promising to implement real curriculum change at our own university. We are super proud of the work we do and are happy to announce that one of our teamies, Sandro Tissi, has most recently been elected as the new president of oikos St. Gallen!