LTEU is pleased to announce our next external speaker event. On 9 March 14:00-15:00, Dr Sarah Gretton and Alice Jackson from University of Leicester will be running an online workshop on Sustainability in the Curriculum.

Abstract

Sustainable development can be adopted as a driver for change within higher education institutions and as an opportunity to transform curricula (as seen with the recent revisions to QAA Subject Benchmark Statements). This workshop will discuss practical ways to embed Education of Sustainable Development (ESD) and specifically the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the formal curricula. Dr. Sarah Gretton – Institutional lead for ESD and Alice Jackson – Sustainability Academic Engagement Officer at the University of Leicester – will bring their experiences in integrating the SDGs into teaching and learning and will guide participants on how to evaluate their modules in relation to the goals. During this session, participants will be asked to associate their module’s intended learning outcomes with the UN SDGs and associated targets, to understand how existing learning objectives can support sustainable development.

Biographies

Sarah Gretton is an Associate Professor in Biological Sciences, Director of University of Leicester’s Natural Sciences programme, and Academic Lead for Education for Sustainable Development at the University of Leicester. Sarah is Senior Fellow of HEA.  Sarah has over a decade’s experience in educational development, working on internally and externally funded projects (HEA, Advance HE, Royal Society for Biology, QAA). Her research interests include sustainability, skills development and interdisciplinary science education and have resulted in multiple publications (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=xv8W6lIAAAAJ&hl=en). She leads the UK Society for Natural Science Scholarship of Teaching and Learning sub-committee and is member of national organising committee for the UK Horizons in STEM Higher Education Conference.  Her educational work has been recognised by a number of accolades which include reaching the finals of the 2017 Green Gown Awards (Sustainability Champion), winning the University of Leicester’s Teaching Excellence award (2017), and receiving a National Teaching Fellowship in 2021.

Alice is a sustainability professional working to deliver the ESD strategy at the University of Leicester. She comes from a sociology background and has previous experience working in employability and graduate skills which has informed her work in engagement and strengthening the sustainability content in the curriculum. She leads on the collection and analysis of data for an annual ESD audit and is enhancing those processes for the institution as part of a QAA funded ESD project. She has worked on the development and teaching of an interdisciplinary sustainable enterprise module to connect students with local SMEs in order to create lasting sustainable impact and has recently been recognised for this work at the 2022 Green Gown awards with a Highly Commended project. She has also developed and delivered Carbon Literacy Training to over 200 staff, students and local businesses as an accredited Carbon Literacy Facilitator.

This builds on our mini conference in December.

You can sign up for the event on our events booking page.

Resources from our previous external speaker series can be found on our blog.

If you’ve got any questions, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (lteu@aber.ac.uk).