Co-creating sustainability and responsibility: Exploring students perceptions of the classroom / workplace relationship

A growing population consumes an average of ‘1.7 earths' each year (CRM 2010) and is expected to reach nine-billion by 2050 (Young and Ernst 2012). 93% of CEOs view sustainability as a business issue (KPMG 2018), with 53% expecting to increase spending in this area. From an academic perspective, publications increasingly focus on sustainability and responsibility (herein S&R) (Handy 2012). In this context, Higher Education ‘can serve as a model of sustainability by integrating all aspects of campus life‘ (Cortese 2003). In this context, millennials increasingly wish to work for organizations who take sustainability seriously and ‘stand ready to take action’ (Cone 2019). Scholars emphasise the value of fundamental change in how decisions around problems associated with sustainability are addressed in knowledge systems (Bennett and Kane 2014; Ferri-Reed 2014). Our Business Studies degree students engage in co-creation, deliberatively working with students to deepen pedagogical understanding and create practical outcomes (Wyborn et al. 2019). Specifically, to facilitate transformative change through knowledge production (Trencher et al. 2014). To this end we seek to understand how aspects of the course can be further developed to enhance education, employability and the replication of co-produced knowledge. We elicit how elements of a Business Studies Course concerned with S&R support employability and consider how we modules can be adapted to further this agenda (i.e. Robertson and Duffy 2020). This responds to the shifting expectation of students, as future business leaders and managers with the potential to shape the orientation of business to S&R. Presenting with two or more students we demonstrate the application of co-creation in module development. Attendees will benefit from attendance by better understanding the learner perspective for S&R education, add value in curricula development and replicate co-creative practice in their own contexts.