By Elena Dimova, Anne Preston and Rehan Shah
UCL’s campus on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park offers exciting new degrees and the location, space and shared vision needed to tackle the biggest challenges facing the planet. Education for sustainable development is a core curriculum theme for all programmes at UCL East. In this presentation, we (alumni, students and staff from UCL) will share a summary of our own research into the state of sustainable education practice at UCL East. We used raw data from a catalogue of over 800 modules for UCL East programmes and established a thematic coding scheme based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to delve into more than 60 nearly degree programmes. In this blog we share the range of sustainability modules at UCL East and hope this gives you ideas for areas for development and interesting ways to develop modules to better embed sustainability ideas.
In this 5-minute video below, one of our presenters will walk you through our research findings, visualised through tables and graphs.
Food for thought: To what extent are the SDGs currently informing you design your curriculum? As academics, how can we better incorporate the SDGs in our teaching and research practices?
Read our short report: The SDGs at UCL East
About Elena, who led this work: Elena is a final year Arts & Sciences (BASc) student at UCL. Her involvement with UCL East began in 2021 when she conducted research with current UCL students about their opinions and preferences on a suite of new modules for UCL East. Her team helped shape the new modules by producing a report, which can be accessed here: UCL East Suite of Modules. The new UCL East modules address a large spectrum of the Sustainable Development Goals and this piqued her interest in exploring the sustainability practices across UCL East as a whole.
Further info:
Join the UCL Education for Sustainable Development Network
Take a look at the UCL ESD toolkit for Embedding sustainability into your teaching and learning
Any further questions about this work, please content Elena: elena.dimova.20@ucl.ac.uk