Our article for EFMD: Fostering Sustainability Literacy in Education
We are excited to share that our insights on sustainability literacy have been featured in EFMD’s Global Focus magazine! Our article, From Student to Changemaker: Building Sustainability Literacy Through the Learner Journey, explores how education must evolve to equip future leaders with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed to address today’s global challenges. It also highlights how institutions can embed sustainability literacy into business education. In this blog, we want to bring to our community some of the key insights we shared.
The need for sustainability literacy
As global challenges intensify, education must step up to prepare students for a world that demands innovative, responsible decision-making. As we often discuss, sustainability literacy—a combination of knowledge, skills, and mindsets (KSM)—is essential for empowering individuals to drive meaningful change. However, traditional education models often fail to cultivate this literacy, needing a more integrated and holistic approach.
A strong foundation in sustainability literacy rests on three interdependent dimensions:
- Knowledge – A deep understanding of sustainability challenges such as climate change, social justice, and economic inequality, enabling evidence-based decision-making.
- Skills – The ability to apply knowledge through critical thinking, collaboration, and systems thinking, turning abstract ideas into concrete solutions.
- Mindsets – An ethical perspective and long-term vision that drive responsible leadership and a commitment to sustainable action.
Higher education institutions (HEIs) play a pivotal role in shaping future leaders by offering experiential learning opportunities, adaptive teaching methods, and robust assessment frameworks. These approaches ensure that students move beyond theoretical understanding to practical problem-solving, bridging the gap between knowledge and action.
Meeting learners where they are
Sustainability education has evolved significantly over the past decade. Once a niche subject for specialists, it is now widely accessible, with students arriving in classrooms at vastly different levels of understanding. This diversity presents a unique challenge for educators, who must navigate varying levels of student competence:
- Zone of Actual Development – Some students, already familiar with sustainability concepts, may find content too basic and disengage.
- Zone of Rupture – Others may struggle with overwhelming content, leading to frustration.
- Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) – The ideal space where students are challenged but remain engaged.
But how do educators find this ideal ZPD? To foster meaningful progress, institutions need assessment strategies that reflect the entire learner journey. This starts with baseline assessments, measuring students’ sustainability knowledge upon entering a program. From there, educators or program directors can tailor the curriculum and/or extracurricular initiatives to elevate the students’ knowledge to a shared foundational understanding.
Our assessment TASK™ is designed precisely to help educators and students directly to understand their strengths and areas of improvement. With adequate guidance, students can be encouraged to look into the subjects where they scored the lowest, or lead peer-to-peer learning on the subjects they know best, as exemplified in the case study of ESCP Business School.
Creating a learning ecosystem for sustainability
For sustainability education to be truly effective, institutions must rethink how learning and sustainability engagement takes place. A well-rounded learning ecosystem extends beyond classroom teaching and includes:
- Cross-disciplinary integration – Breaking down subject silos to encourage systems thinking and a broader understanding of sustainability challenges.
- Active learning methods – Engaging students through hands-on projects, simulations, and problem-solving exercises that connect theory to real-world application.
- Institutional alignment – Ensuring that universities and business schools walk the talk by embedding sustainability not only in curricula but also in their operational policies and culture. When institutions fail to align their teaching with their practices, students may become disengaged, questioning the sincerity of sustainability initiatives. To maintain credibility and impact, schools must fully commit to sustainability values.
Measuring and tracking progress: a holistic approach
As in business, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The same applies to sustainability education. However, traditional assessment methods remain confined to individual courses, missing these broader learning experiences that take place both inside and outside of the classroom.
Here is where the value of comparable, continuous assessment is realized. Summative assessments, evaluating students’ sustainability knowledge at the end of a program, enable HEIs to understand where knowledge attainment did, or didn’t, take place. Beyond this longitudinal outlook, it is valuable to compare different cohorts, as such benchmarking can help institutions understand which learning pathways have which results.
That's why we designed TASK™ to be both comparable and transdisciplinary, enabling students from different programs or schools to take a similar assessment. This helps them measure their knowledge and allows institutions to benchmark their impact.
Beyond knowledge evaluation, holistic evaluation methods should also find its place in a programs assessment design, combining standardized tests with reflective exercises, project-based assessments and behavioral surveys. By assessing not just what students know, but how they use their knowledge, institutions can drive meaningful improvements in sustainability education.
Looking ahead: the role of HEIs in a sustainable future
HEIs bear a responsibility to prepare future leaders who are well-informed and capable of ethical and decisive action. By embedding sustainability literacy across the entire educational journey, they can fulfill their commitment of preparing leaders who will shape a more sustainable world.
A key aspect of this transformation is ensuring that progress is measurable. Holistic assessment frameworks will help institutions validate the impact of their educational strategies and drive systemic change in sustainability education.
For a deeper dive into these ideas, we invite you to read Sulitest’s contribution to EFMD’s Global Focus Magazine. Be sure to check it out and join the conversation on how we can empower students to become responsible changemakers.
