Graduate Quality - Sustainability-focused

Sustainability is a strategic priority for UniSC. It is an imperative in the Strategic Plan and the Sustainability - Governing Policy explicitly links UniSC's role in supporting and creating a sustainable future through learning, teaching and research. As a Graduate Attribute, Sustainability-focussed aligns to learning outcomes where students recognise the interdependence between economic, social and ecological systems and evaluate how different practices will affect outcomes across these domains. It requires students to compare alternative actions and consider complex systems. The goal of sustainability-focussed learning outcomes is achieving a balance that would provide for the needs of both current and future generations.

A sustainability-focussed person:

• Recognises the value of transdisciplinary knowledge, intercultural understanding, systemic thinking, sustainability and ethical practice.
• Purposefully connects discipline knowledge and practice to advance wider social, environmental and economic objectives.
• Uses models or frameworks to identify potential impacts of an action, product, process, communication, experiment, technology, social interaction, policy or plan and devise solutions.

Learning-centred activities for Sustainability-focussed

Problem and inquiry based learning, investigating wicked problems, collaboration, expert groups, scenarios, simulations and debates.

Words associated with learning outcomes for Sustainability-focussed

Evaluate, reflect, apply, collaborative, justify, conceptualise, analyse, interpret, explore options.

Example of aligning with criteria

Course learning outcome: Deconstruct and evaluate key problems and concepts of international environmental politics

Criteria example: Deconstruction of key problems

Evaluation of key problems

Introductory

• Is familiar with the terms used in describing sustainability in their own field of study.
• Can recognise obvious interactions, contradictions and imbalances between economic, social and environmental outcomes.
• Demonstrates an understanding how the discipline connects to the four realms: social, cultural, environmental and economic.

Developing

• Frames discipline specific issues in the context of sustainable development.
• Uses established methods to evaluate how alternative actions contribute to or impede explicit sustainability objectives.
• Considers the impact of specific technologies and how social, cultural, economic, environmental values are implicit in its construction.

Graduate

• Collaborates across disciplines to revise and expand methods against which sustainability will be measured.
• Recognises the contested nature of sustainable development definitions and interpretations.
• Demonstrates a coherent and advanced understanding of diverse approaches to sustainability.

Sustainability-focussed thinking enables students to navigate in a changing and disruptive employment environment. Sustainability-focussed encapsulates the all the graduate attributes and engenders key qualities of critical thinking, ethical practice with a global perspective.