Sustainability Education at TU Dublin
Sustainability education has two interlinked and complementary elements in TU Dublin. Firstly, it involves engaging our academic and professional staff through training, professional development, and education to build capacity, skills, and knowledge. This approach also enables and empowers our academic staff to embed and apply sustainability in their disciplines and enables and empowers our professional services to transform our services and campus operations so we can meet the nationally mandated climate action targets.
Secondly, education involves infusing sustainability through our curricula to enable and empower students to progressively develop their sustainability knowledge and skills in a manner, which is clearly linked and applied to their programme.
To ensure our graduates can lead the sustainability agenda with passion and purpose, we must engage the expertise and talent within the University to build capacity among staff to deliver innovative programmes that address the global challenges set out in the UN SDGs. This ethos will be reflected in using our campuses as living labs, where sustainability education will deploy best practices and encourage innovation.
At the heart of TU Dublin’s Strategic Intent 2030 is SDG 4 Quality Education. SDG 4 is an enabler to making all 17 SDGs relevant at faculty, school, discipline, and programme level. Strategic Intent ‘PL1: Being a Beacon for Sustainability’ signals the university's high-level commitment to building Sustainability and climate action into everything we do. Strategic Intent ‘PL2: Creating Responsible Global Citizens’ sets out a bottom-up approach to sustainability education and societal engagement to ensure the University has a deep and positive impact on our planet by facilitating our transition to a carbon-neutral economy.
Specifically, the Strategic Intent to 2030 sets the following objectives under the Planet pillar.
PL2: Creating responsible global citizens.
PL2.01: A new generation of TU Dublin graduates will be leading the sustainability agenda with passion and purpose.
PL2:01: All academic programmes will embed sustainability, and every learner will engage in climate action.
The Sustainability Education Team
The Sustainability Education team provides strategic leadership and supports innovation and best practice on the embedding of sustainability into the curriculum and culture at TU Dublin. The team is led by Head of Sustainability Education, Dr Brian Gormley, together with Sustainability Education Leads, Dr Catherine Bates, Dr Lucia Walsh and Dr Ken Boyle.
Embedding sustainability into society through education requires actions from people across all areas of TU Dublin to create a culture of inclusion where there is an equitable opportunity to access and deliver higher education. We are committed to developing capability within our University community to justly respond to global challenges through a diverse community of learners, educators, researchers, and administrators.
Learn more from what services the Sustainability Education Team can offer you.