How to Develop Sustainablity Teaching through Student Feedback

BI Norwegian Business School’s Centre for Sustainability and Energy hosts monthly 30-minute inspirational talks on "why" and "how" to teach sustainability and responsibility in business schools. BI professor Caroline Dale Ditlev-Simonsen hosts the talks.

Today, we welcome Dr. Thomas Dyllick. He is professor emeritus for Sustainability Management at University of St.Gallen, and Director at The Institute for Business Sustainability, Lucerne, Switzerland. He is Director of the Executive Diploma in Advanced Sustainability, Co-founder and member of the Supervisory Board, Positive Impact Rating Association. He is passionate about “True Business Sustainability” and “Responsible Management Education”.

Dyllick will talk about the importance of student feedback in teaching sustainability and will focus in particular on the value of the student-driven sustainability rating of business schools; Positive Impact Rating (PIR). He will present the PIR, its background, its objectives, its structure, and some preliminary insights from the 2023 rating results. The full 2023 results will be presented at the PRME Global Forum in New York 13-14 June.

The discussion will draw on BI’s first participation in PIR this year, but it would be relevant for other business schools. BI President Karen Spens has stated that “The PIR survey will give us invaluable student feedback on how we as a school are doing on sustainability. And together with our students we will be able to do more and better for sustainability.”

This talk is relevant for students, faculty and professional staff in business schools.

• See the presentation (PDF) for the webinar 1 June 2023. 

Why is this talk relevant?

To solve today’s dire societal challenges, we need leaders who are able to generate purpose, ethics, system-thinking, interdisciplinary innovations and societal impact. International businesses and global associations are urging management educators to transform programmes and courses to deliver the kind of leadership that the world needs.

Are business schools too slow to transform curriculum, pedagogies and incentive structures to develop our future leaders? If so, how can they speed up?

• BI has been committed to UN Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) since 2016.
• See BI Sustainability and Responsible Management Report to PRME 2022.

See recordings of earlier BI Green Bag Lunch Talks on teaching sustainability:

• November 2022 - EADA
• December 2022 - Hanken School of Economics
• February 2023 - AACSB (Accreditation organization)
• March 2023 - ManpowerGroup
• May 2023 - BI Msc in Busines Programme