At the start of the summer I was approached by a contact at Newcastle Business School to run Sustainability seminars to cover for a recently departed academic. The module is led by Dr Helen Kopnina, who has a publication list as long as your an orangutan’s arm (Helen’s passion is biodiversity). Helen gives a lecture each Tuesday and then the students split into smaller seminar groups over the following days. In each seminar we quickly recap the subject then have a task to dig into that topic in more detail (there are a couple of other long term exercises for the students to cover as well). I’ve had two such groups every Friday afternoon.

Given that this is a compulsory module, my immediate impression was that the students really enjoyed getting stuck into Sustainability. However I have to say that, given the massive, complex  spreadsheet projected on to the screen in the next-door seminar room every week, I may not be up against what you might call stiff competition in the holding attention stakes. But there is genuine engagement from the students, despite the end of the week timing. In fact, in one exercise, where the students had to role play stakeholders in a decision by Shell whether to restart arctic drilling, I admonished one group for not being cynical enough. For example, they took the Net Zero commitments by shareholders with substantial fossil fuel investments at face value, and waved through an immediate pivot to renewables (if only).

The other big takeaway was that if you really want to learn something properly, try teaching it to a room of people. As I have been slotting into a module written by somebody else, I was taken well out of my comfort zone in several places, particularly around biodiversity. The en-roads model was another eye-opener – I didn’t realise there was such a sophisticated free-to-use climate policy model available. The more difficult areas were the inevitable but very few places where my perspective differs somewhat from the course materials, but the students then get a diversity of viewpoints which I think is important in Sustainability.

It’s been a lot of fun as well. For an exercise where the students had to develop a lesson on biodiversity accounting for 12 year olds, one team produced a side-splittingly funny Mr Beast-themed session with a jokes-per-minute gag rate to challenge Airplane. Having a YouTube-addicted 12 year old myself, I got at least half the memes.

The litmus test comes next – after Christmas I have to mark their assignments and I’ll find out if they really were listening to me! But longer term, the true test will be whether the students take this Sustainability interest into their future business careers.