Universities and colleges are critical components for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as indicated in the agenda itself. Their prominent role is even crucial as the achievement of its Goals has been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and other global as well as regional crises. Such circumstances have created a wide range of challenges, affecting in particular developing and vulnerable countries.
As a concrete response of academia to these challenges, the University College Cork (UCC), a member institution of the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) in Ireland, embarked on the development of a Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Toolkit in order to generate a useful resource for academic staff to better integrate the 2030 Agenda within their teaching practice.
The project was funded through the National Forum for Teaching and Learning, a national body in Ireland that leads and provides advice about the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education, and originated in response to a baseline review that was conducted on how the SDGs are or were included in learning and teaching within the university across the various academic programs offered.
This baseline review was undertaken as part of UCC's submission to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education's STARS rating system. The submission process provided a gap analysis of the university's sustainability program, revealing that the SDG coverage within its curriculum was low. Although the university is, according to its data, ranked in the top ten universities in the world for sustainability and impact.
Further analysis of this outcome uncovered two essential findings. First, there was ample enthusiasm to include the SDGs in the teaching processes across the institution, but there was also a lack of resources to support this. Moreover, it also revealed that many of the university's lecturers and professors were already implicitly including the SDGs in the curriculum through various means.
In 2018, the university published a new academic strategy, which included sustainability as one of six themes within a new “Connected Curriculum” aimed at enhancing the student learning experience through active participation. The SDG Toolkit was created to support teaching staff in improving their teaching linked to the SDGs while developing new linkages where appropriate.
Consultations with academic staff from other Irish universities indicated that the gaps within UCC were mirrored sector wide. Therefore, it was decided that the resource should be open access, easily adaptable, and not just for this individual institution. In this sense, the tangible result of this overall endeavor would ultimately benefit higher education institutions in the whole country.
The toolkit development was a cross-university collaborative process undertaken by Dr. John Barimo, Research Support Officer, and led by a steering committee and an advisory group. It took a “students as partners” approach, with two student body members sitting on the advisory group. This led to the SDG Resource Library section of the toolkit also serving as a student resource.
To inform toolkit development, 1:1 and small group focus sessions were conducted with over 40 academic staff and 25 students. Techniques and resources were piloted in 20 lectures across several disciplines. And six professional workshops and one intensive professional development design sprint event were also undertaken. The toolkit is an open-source web-based resource available to all higher education institutions and is easily adaptable.
The toolkit is currently being used in at least one other Irish university and has been used by Bard College, an institution in the United States, as part of its annual worldwide SDG Teach-In event. Resources within the toolkit include among others, inroads to primary literature, videos, case studies, and interactive tools to enhance teaching and learning in the Irish and also the global context.
Professor John O'Halloran, President of UCC and Chair of the university's Green Forum, said: “the launch of this open-source toolkit represents another milestone in our sustainability journey; it embodies the student-led, research-informed and practice-focused approach which has made us one of the leading universities globally for impact on the Sustainable Development Goals.”
