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!

oikos Barcelona consist of a textbook example of how oikos is implementing curriculum change in universities. Since its chapter foundation in 2013, the local committee has been incredibly engaged in camp activities and university collaborations achieving a position of a bridge between students and faculty members regarding sustainability progress.

Step by step

Our community was born through a group of compromised students, motivated to bring change in their university (ESADE) both in its external image as a camp (for instance, reducing plastic in the cafeteria) and internal structure, related to syllabus and academic teaching.

After its early years of establishment and strategic planning, its fruits started to show. oikos Barcelona managed to successfully entable a communication channel with faculty members. In particular, it settled a long-term relationship with the “Identity and Mission” department of ESADE, attracted by the dedication and impressive outputs reached by the chapter in raising awareness on sustainability-related issues. Examples of such activities include emotion, an event aimed at discussing the future of mobility, which reached local newspapers, the Sustainability Cycle, which consisted on an annual case competition based on a specific sustainable-related topic or the Sustainability Week, a seven-day long event devoted to raising awareness among students, which was further implemented to teachers. You can find the Annual Reports and full activities conducted for the years 2018-2019,  2019-2020 and 2020-2021 here.

Towards a fruitful collaboration

ESADE was looking forward to a change in its inner structure to entail sustainability as one of its core pillars, and found in oikos the perfect partner. Through a series of prolonged meetings, oikos aided the university with several action plans for the initial shift. 

During the first year of implementation of the sustainability plan in the university, the activities were mainly focused on raising awareness. ESADE alongside oikos Barcelona conducted a series of actions related to increasing consciousness about the university’s impact on sustainability, its strengths and weaknesses in relation to the topic and the perception received by all the stakeholders involved. As student representatives, oikos Barcelona’s goal was to give voice to undergraduate students in their perception of sustainability in the camp. For that objective, the chapter offered ESADE tools such as the PIR survey, which served as a rating panel of the university in its work in that concrete area. Not only did oikos Barcelona impulsed PIR implementation, but achieved through an intensive campaign a representative amount of 1,000 answers from students in its second edition last year. This supposed a qualitative jump since its first edition which achieved 126 answers. Moreover, oikos Barcelona also helped the university design a similar survey for the Law faculty as a starting point for conducting curricular review.  

Currently, the chapter is analysing, together with the Identity and Mission department, all the results compiled and conducting a report of focus areas for the university which will be presented to the Dean in November.

Other activities conducted during the “raise awareness” stage were the implementation of the Sustainability Week as an inclusive project of all the university’s student associations. This meant adapting the project for the involvement of each student organization to conduct an activity related to the SDGs throughout a week, in which we achieved a high participation rate of 550 participants from all kinds of backgrounds (staff members, students etc.). A similar week was also conducted prior to the students, one for professors only in which they were encouraged to develop innovative proposals for the improvement of ESADE as a sustainable faculty. During those days, a whole range of topics were covered, from mental health to gender parity and some impact activities were designed such as a beach clean up in the Barceloneta. 

oikos Barcelona in 2021-2022 term

Based on PIR answers and Law faculty answers, professors are starting to adapt their syllabus in order to include a vision on sustainability in their teachings. Some subjects, such as finance, are being reshaped with the help of oikos international, with the creation of a sustainable finance toolkit, which will aid such transformations in the academic field. Concretely, oikos Barcelona is helping to build a think tank on sustainable finance in ESADE, which will directly collaborate with oikos international sustainable finance Squad, in order to foster research in this area.

This term, ESADE is taking its sustainability plan to a second stage, developing concrete steps towards the achievement of its goals. For that, it has created six working groups, following six different areas of development, which involve faculty members, professors and oikos Barcelona members, as representatives of students’ voices. Concretely, oikos Barcelona is working in the “Curriculum, Investigation and Debate” field, collaborating in  the drafting of  KPIs. 

Hence, oikos Barcelona working areas for this term are the following: 

• development of a sustainable finance think tank in connection with the sustainable finance toolkit of oikos international, 
• collaborations with ESADE on curricular review and
•  PIR implementation, which will be repeated in 2022.

Assessing impact:

• Raising awareness in several topics conducting activities with a participatory rate as high as 550 people (Sustainability Week), 100 (emotion), 90 (beach clean up, twice a year).
• Establishing a long-lasting collaboration with ESADE’s Identity and Mission Department
• PIR implementation with a representative outcome of 1000 answers. 
• Analysis of the survey and conclusions presented to the Dean.
• Aiding in curricular review of some concrete subjects. Special input on the creation of a sustainable finance think tank in ESADE for term 2021-2022
• Involvement on the drafting of ESADE’s sustainability plan for term 2021-2022