Institution

University College Cork

Description

The initiative we embarked on this year was integrating several sustainable development goals into UCC’s Pre-Sessional programme’s curriculum. Our Pre-Sessional programme is aimed at international applicants who have already met their academic requirements but require an improvement in their English language level in order to receive a full offer for their chosen degree programme. Course length varies between 6 and 16 weeks depending on their entry requirements.

The main reason for integrating the topic of sustainability was to ensure there was a common theme running through the programme, which can enhance language acquisition, involves deeper cognitive processing skills and also supports more meaningful interaction between students. As we have students from a wide range of disciplines attending these programs, it has always proven difficult to find topics that are both interesting, engaging and relevant to the students’ individual disciplines.

By using the sustainable development goals as a theme and designing tasks and assessments that required students to relate a sustainable development goal to their disciplines, the programme did prove itself to be engaging and made students more aware of global issues and of how their subjects could relate to sustainability. This, potentially, could have an impact on student’s future behaviours and actions in terms of the sustainable development goals

Intended Learning Outcomes

• To recognise and evaluate a link between a sustainable development goal and the student’s individual discipline
• To critically engage with the chosen sustainable development goal
• To seek out personal, local and global perspectives
• To recognise and appreciate diversity
• To make students aware of UCC’s Sustainability and Climate Action Plan 2023 – 2028
• To become a more global citizen

Teaching and Learning Approach

With participatory & collaborative learning at the heart of all English language teaching, we aimed to couple this with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) by selecting a number of SDG goals that were relevant to the students’ disciplines, such as SDG4 Quality education for all (relevant for students taking an MA in Teaching Chinese to speakers of another language) and SDG12 Responsible Consumption & Production (relevant to students taking an MSc in Food Business & Innovation or MengSc Mechanical Engineering). These were then divided into two-week blocks. We sourced relevant articles/lectures on these topics and used these to teach/practise related vocabulary, syntax, and grammatical structures in a variety of interactive ways while developing the students’ 4 language skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing), as well as reflective and critical thinking skills.

Assessment Strategy

As this was the first year that we embedded sustainable development goals into our programme, we did not specifically assess content relating to sustainability, but rather we focused on the assessment of their English language level with points awarded if they made a valid connection to an SDG. They were encouraged to be critical, so points were also awarded for their level of criticality and engagement with the topic.

Impact and Outcomes

Student feedback was very positive, with 95% of students stating that they enjoyed learning about the SDGs and, more importantly, the full cohort (100%) stated that they learned how to be more sustainable in the future. Additionally, 100% of students also agreed that the material was both relevant and of interest to them.  In tutorials, informal feedback from students was very positive, with comments such as ‘The reading topics are very interesting and give me a bigger picture of the world’ and ‘The topics we talk about can be connected to our disciplines’. Following a trip to Cobh, a small town in Cork, one of the students commented in her reflective journal: ‘Also, I was surprised and impressed to see that Cobh has such an environmental protection project.’ – something she may not have considered before studying these areas in class

Collaboration, Partnerships & Student Participation

As we were piloting the inclusion of sustainability goals this year,  there was no collaboration with external partners. However, teachers working on the Pre-sessional programme collaborated on sourcing relevant materials, such as readings and recorded lectures. On the other hand, students participated with their own research topic which had to include reference to at least one sustainable development goal. They also worked on a presentation with two other classmates, each studying in a different discipline. This multidisciplinary presentation had to show a common link/thread to a sustainable development goal and their disciplines.

Student Engagement

22 students for 2025.

Discipline

Teaching and Learning

Programme

UCC Pre-Sessional Programmes

Best Practices & Resources

Top Tips

• Try to find some ‘feel good’ sustainability information. One issue that arose was the lack of positive stories when engaging with the SDG’s which could lead to a certain amount of negative feelings from students as the stories we were dealing with were generally ‘bad news’ stories.
• Connect the SDGs with local issues, at the University, city you live in or the regions that students come from. This would ensure even higher student engagement is at a higher level as they can see the relevance of the SDGs.

Useful Resources

• A useful framework for integrating sustainability into curriculum: Cambridge Sustainability Framework for ELT : https://assets.cambridgeenglish.org/events/sustainability-framework-for-elt.pdf
• Freely available teaching materials for English for Academic Purposes (EAP), emphasizing the importance of sustainability and collaboration among educators. https://developeap.weebly.com/downloads-and-useful-resources.html
• A very useful website that has news articles written by academic experts, working with professional journalists with links to academic sources, amongst others. The Conversation www.theconversation.com