Abstract:

Enacting education for sustainable development has become one of the key targets in education. This educational paradigm aims at developing students’ knowledge and skills to act with responsibility in inter-human and human-nature relationships, reflect on pluralistic values in the global setting and articulate one’s own, consider economic, social and environmental consequences of human (inter)action. Moreover, recently, discussions on education for sustainable development has produced the European sustainability competence framework of GreenComp (Bianchi et al., 2022) that consists of four competence areas: embodying sustainability values, embracing complexity, envisioning sustainable futures, acting for sustainability.

The experience that we will share with our contribution relates the case study as a didactic tool to developing students’ GreenComp. Specifically, we will share experience in teaching the Case Nina (Lämsä et al., 2012) as a tool to develop all four areas of the GreenComp. In addition, we will highlight the potential of the case study as a problem-based learning method to stimulate student’s cognitive and creative-thinking capabilities by giving an opportunity for the class to (i) argue the importance of gender equality for socio-economic development and achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goals, (ii) reflect on gender roles applying a cross-cultural perspective, (iii) reflect on individual attitudes and human resource management practices which construct gender inequality and discrimination at work (e.g. gender pay gap, glass ceiling, tokenism etc.), (iv) work in groups and propose how the theory of change framework could be applied to deconstruct or undo gender inequality at work, by exploiting the concepts of ethical leadership (Brown and Mitchell, 2010), ethical organizational culture (Kaptein, 2008), socially responsible human resource management practices (Barrena-Martínez et al., 2019). The presentation will conclude by raising critical questions how to evaluate achievement of GreenComp-based learning outcomes in the times of ChatGPT. We believe that our presentation would be of specific interest to educators teaching organizational ethics and corporate social responsibility, gender and organization, human resource management at different study cycles.

References:
[1] Barrena-Martínez, J., López-Fernández, M., Romero-Fernández, P.M. (2019).Towards a configuration of socially responsible human resource management policies and practices: findings from an academic consensus. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 30(17), 2544-2580.
[2] Bianchi, G., Pisiotis, U., Cabrera Giraldez, M. GreenComp – The European sustainability competence framework. Bacigalupo, M., Punie, Y. (editors), EUR 30955 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2022; ISBN 978-92-76-46485-3, doi:10.2760/13286, JRC128040.
[3] Brown, M. E., Mitchell, M. S. (2010). Ethical and unethical leadership: exploring new avenues for future research. Business Ethics Quarterly, 20 (4): 583–616.
Kaptein. M. (2008). Developing and testing a measure for the ethical culture of organizations: the corporate ethical virtues model. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29 (7), 923–947.
[4] Lämsä, A.-M., Jyrkinen, M., Heikkinen, S. (2012). Women in managerial careers. “Why is she getting annoyed with minor issues?” The Nina Case. In Pučėtaitė, R. (sud.) Cases in Organizational Ethics, pp. 17-22. Vilnius: VUKHF.

Keywords:

Sustainability competence, case study, gender equality.