How to Bring Sustainability Issues in Global Supply Chains into the Classroom?

Purpose: Sustainability is one of the major key terms in our modern globalized world affected by such different but nevertheless closely interrelated issues like prosperity of worldwide trade, globally-spanning supply chains, the growing social gap and the threatening effects of climate change. The paper shows how responsible citizenship and reflective critical thinking as well as a deeper understanding of these complex interdependencies can be conveyed in a systematic way to a group of international business students in form of a one-week block seminar course in the CEMS Master-in-International-Management (MIM) program.
Design/methodology/approach: The paper includes a discussion of proven course design, general key skills fostered, didactic approaches and methods employed along with feedback mechanisms and evaluation results demonstrating clearly its impact on student’s mind sets afterwards.
Findings:
Based on the discussions with our students and post-course reflective reports it turned out, that for many of them their perception of sustainability issues and of their own behaviour has changed during this single week because of the topics dealt with in our course.
Practical implications: A well thought-out didactic approach and extraordinary commitment and dedication by the instructors is inevitable to ensure the success of such a course.
Original/value: This paper explains in a compact way, how sustainability issues in global supply chain management can be tackled successfully even in such time restricted one-week block seminar.