It has emerged from our interactions with the higher education space that there is a lot of interest shown in the development and production of variety of knowledge assets relevant to sustainability in higher education. It would add great value, to create relevant educational material that can be embedded into the existing curriculums and be used as learning tools. This could include handbooks on pedagogic practices, case study development, compendiums of best practices, teaching guidelines etc. We have endeavoured to facilitate the development of such literature across disciplines in collaboration with leading institutes who are at the apex of their disciplinary streams.
We have collaborated with IIM, Ahmedabad to develop and publish a unique Sustainability Case Study compendium to be used by B-schools across India for disseminating industry practices in sustainability as well as for promoting classroom learning.
Management schools often use case studies as a pedagogical tool to expose management students to the real world situations and managerial responses to those specific decision situations. Sustainability, being an emerging field, suffers from a lack of such teaching cases that document and analyze the corporate sustainability actions in the Indian context. In order to illustrate important concepts, management school faculty are often forced to use case studies from firms operating in more advanced countries, raising questions on their applicability to decision making in an Indian context. Thus, it is important to develop a repository of teaching cases that management faculty across the country can adopt for their teaching needs.
WIPRO and IIMA have jointly identified various areas where the faculty of IIMA along with key faculty from top B-schools will document the situations, or success story/challenges through writing the case studies. The case studies developed can also be used by organizations for its internal training programmes. Sacnhored by IIMA, this compendium will be published either as an academic textbook or as on open source literature with free to accees to all interested parties.
Objectives
We have embarked on academic collaboration with CEPT University to develop a first of its kind compendium of sustainability case studies as a pedagogic tool for the urban planning discipline. The project titled “Development of Case studies and other pedagogic tools for urban planning” tries to address one of the key challenges for sustainable development in planning education by developing a repository of teaching cases that planning faculty across the country can adopt for their teaching needs.
It aims to provide real-world, detailed case studies of sustainable planning and development for use in planning classes, with the ultimate goal of producing more reflective (and effective) practitioners. Over two academic workshops, the cases for the project have been developed with the input of professionals and action researchers working across the planning and development arena within the country. The diverse sectors where development planning practitioners work include: housing, transportation, basic services, infrastructure, waste collection, food systems, economic development, environmental planning, public health, disaster and climate change – representing every region of India. The scenarios are based on real-life situations representative of the kinds of professional decisions or actions common to development planning.
The Chemical Engineering discipline, the way it is taught and the implementation of that knowledge is critical to long term sustainability. The critical concepts that this discipline visits, puts in a unique position to impact decisions that the larger chemical industry makes while developing new paradigms, strategies and products which could prove central for building a sustainable society. In keeping with our larger goal of facilitating the integration of sustainability concepts in higher education curricula, we have started initial discussions with IIT Bombay to curate the development of a teaching guide/manual for all core Chemical Engg courses that accurately maps critical sustainability concepts to existing course content.
Our collaboration with ICT saw them play an anchoring role in driving a pilot initiative within the chemical engineering discipline. The broad agenda was to develop a set of first principles/operating guidelines for making sustainability thinking integral to the existing curriculum and pedagogy in Chemical Engineering teaching. This was done through an academic workshop attended by faculty representing chemical engineering departments from different colleges.
The workshops sought to do the following: