GSD staff and students representing at the Warwick Education Conference
Two members of our teaching faculty and a current student will be representing the Global Sustainable Development department at this year’s Warwick Education Conference. This conference is a significant annual event in the academic calendar and aims to bring students and staff together to connect, share ideas and experiences, and inspire each other.
The theme of this year’s conference, ‘Transformative Learning’, is a perfect fit for GSD, as it asks us to view education not just as a response to change but as a driving force for it. The conference will include a morning keynote by Professor Paul Ashwin, Lancaster University, on ‘What are we educating students for?’, and a number of presentations, panels and workshops.
Dr Katie Reeves and Dr Elizabeth Chant will be running an afternoon presentation titled ‘The ‘STEAM’ approach in Higher Education: Reflections on Interdisciplinary Collaboration’, which focuses on the creation of their GD124 module Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Sustainable Development, detailing the design process and collaboration behind creating an interdisciplinary module.
Combining the diverse expertise of the module leads across Cultural Studies and Environmental History (Elizabeth) and Earth Sciences (Katie), the module aims to bridge different perspectives and approaches to knowledge generation in the context of sustainable development to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration among Year 1 students. In the talk, Elizabeth and Katie will reflect on their experiences of designing the module to foreground interdisciplinary collaboration across the arts and sciences, including tools they used such as a discipline positionality map, their focus on communication strategies, and the exciting outputs that students produced, which ranged from podcasts, to paintings, to crochet.
Final-year Economic Studies and GSD student Madhura Sen will also be presenting in the afternoon, on ‘Teaching Complexity in Sustainability in the Manufacturing Sector: A Systematic Review and Comparative Analysis’. Her session will explore insights from a systematic review and comparative analysis - conducted on global best practices for teaching sustainability in the manufacturing sector. Drawing on interdisciplinarity, systems thinking, and experiential learning methodologies, the study contrasts international strategies with current approaches at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) and the University of Warwick’s Engineering programs.
You can find out more about all the their sessions, including information on how to register for the conference, here.