Abstract
Bringing the student learning experience to life and making it as realistic as possible that it could replicate the workplace is an important feature of any business school. We expect our students to ‘step outside’ their comfort zones and be challenged through deeper learning and authentic assessment. Golich et al (2000:1) argue that as educators, we need to be as “objectively and meticulously as possible—real (or realistic) events or problems so that students experience the complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties confronted.” To facilitate this ‘step outside’, we adopted a game-based learning approach that enabled students to drill deeper into the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and carbon management discussion, by adopting an approach that immersed students in authentic practice (Pagano, 2013).
Sustainable Development is commonly referred to through the Brundtland Commission’s understanding as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Since that time, the concept of sustainable development, sustainability, has been explained in different ways in different contexts, with a common theme of around the interrelationship between environmental, economic and social dimensions, alternatively referred to a ‘people, plant, prosperity’ (the 3Ps or Triple Bottom Line) (Elkington, 1987; Rodriguez et al, 2002). SDGs act as a way to interpret sustainable development and are used to provide the context/ focus for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in higher education. It is important that university graduates have a strong knowledge of these concepts with skills and competencies when entering a competitive marketplace for the job roles (Winfield and Howarth, 2023; World Economic Forum, 2023; IEMA, 2024).
Having reviewed students’ knowledge and application of sustainability, SDGs and carbon management in a final year undergraduate business-related module, the Nottingham Business School teaching team turned to using gamification to aid deeper student learning. Instead of relying on more traditional teaching methods in lectures and seminars, the team uses a board game, ‘Creative Connections’ (Leinster & Cole, 2017) in weekly seminars to strengthen understanding gained in lectures and associated reading through identifying connections between these concepts from systems perspective which is at the heart of sustainability agenda. Therefore, this paper seeks to examine the impact of game-based approaches on student learning in sustainability and, at the Conference, also learn from peers about how this innovative teaching approach might be further developed to enhance ESD in business schools.