Sustainability In Business Education

Sustainability in various forms and shapes has slowly crept into business schools. But the fact remains that though sustainability has been integrated into management education in the past decade most of the studies depict the difficulty in achieving a long term behavioral change regarding sustainability (Deyoung, 1993, Jackson 2005, lorenzoni et al 2001).The concept of weak and strong sustainability can be applied to Business schools as well.It was Robin and Reidenbach ,who, in 1987 suggested incorporating business ethics and social responsibility into the strategic marketing planning processes over 27 years ago, many educators have yet to decide whether sustainability education is best covered ostensibly in all business classes or in greater

Mainstream business curricula and courses tend to either touch superficially on sustainability issues or to offer separate “silos” of each main discipline, adding sustainability topics in the program or to a course. As Fisher and Bonn (2011) state, lack of qualified staff to teach sustainability, lack of resources to develop and implement sustainability, the theoretical and broad character of sustainability as a vision further fuel the complexity of this challenge for management education.

Inculcating values and self-discovery experience through an ongoing process of activity based learning and applied approach infused in all subject areas should lead to sensitizing the students to sustainability issues. The education should motivate students to integrate sustainability into their professional and personal lives. Therefore, a similar process from transition to transformation is required in business schools as well. For this, the education has to go beyond classrooms and to the fields for students to relate to the impact of the companies on the

Experiential learning is a process of constructing knowledge that involves a creative tension among the four learning modes that is responsive to contextual demands. The first mode of experiential learning that is, Concrete Experience (CE) and Abstract Conceptualization (AC) involves a direct experiential encounter with the learning event, rather than simply a thought process associated with the learning (Borzak, 1981)

The second mode of experiential learning Reflective Observation (RO) and Active Experimentation (AE) addresses students ‘reflection on direct participation and direct encounters within the events of everyday life (Houle, 1980)

It is the idea of learning new things based on the innate variations of life-experiences one attains each day. Students learn through real life experiences and experience shapes a person‘s capacity to bundle or chunk knowledge from past experiences to shape future experiences (Buriak, McNurlen & Harper,