Empowering Business Students to develop Global Citizenship competencies and mind-sets through engagement with a Real-World Sustainability Challenge: The Good Clothes Fair Pay Campaign
Our proposed roundtable will bring together colleagues from TU Dublin’s Faculty of Business Alacoque McAlpine, Olivia Freeman and Lucia Walsh and TU Dublin’s Sustainability Office Cormac McMahon along with Mairi Lowe from Fashion Revolution. Our discussion will tease out the role of the university in general and more specifically teaching and learning practice in promoting the Global Sustainability agenda. We address the following questions: How can we embed education for sustainability into our university curriculum, programmes, and specific modules? How can we ascertain how best to pitch the sustainability agenda across diverse student groups with differing levels of knowledge and skills in areas including climate change, biodiversity, and global inequalities? How can we engender a sustainability first mindset and understanding of the importance of global citizenship in the students we work with? How can we awaken our students to their own role as potential change-makers and empower them to develop and utilise their own platforms to communicate the substance and urgency of key sustainability issues in business contexts to audiences within and beyond university walls?
We will discuss how we have approached some of the challenges we have faced in our attempts to bring sustainability front and centre in our work. We have embraced the idea of Authentic Assessment (Farrell, 2020) and endeavoured to design real-world engagement opportunities for our students including Advocacy-based and social media content development assessment briefs. Our NGO roundtable contributor Mairi will describe the Good Clothes, Fair Pay Campaign[1] which involves a coalition of NGOs, investors and living wage experts including Fashion Revolution[2] and Fairwear foundation [3] . The campaign will harness civic power to call on the European Commission to introduce legislation requiring that brands and retailers in the garment sector conduct specific due diligence in their supply chain to ensure workers are paid living wages. Our discussion will set out the context in which this campaign has emerged. We will highlight the way the purchasing habits of consumers living on the European continent, contribute albeit in many cases unwittingly to a humanitarian crisis for garment workers living in countries characterised by developing economies, for example, China, Bangladesh and India. We will outline our plans for collaborating with Fashion Revolution to develop a number of Assessment briefs for TU Dublin business students across several modules including Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM), Sustainability Principles, Sustainability Leadership, Business Sustainability, Consumer Behaviour and Critical Consumption Studies. The overarching assessment theme centres on Communicating Sustainability Imperatives within the Fashion Industry. Students will be required to broaden their knowledge around SDG awareness, product life-cycles, governance of supply chains, the role of civic engagement and activism in sustainability, consumer attitudes to sustainability and sustainable consumption practices. Students will also develop new skillsets including social media content creation as they will be tasked with promoting the Good Clothes, Fair Pay Campaign to consumer groups and promoting engagement across a range of platforms including Instagram and TikTok. Completion of these actions will expose students to a real-world sustainability communication challenge and support the development of a global citizenship-oriented mindset.
[1] https://www.goodclothesfairpay.eu/about