Transforming University Teaching and Learning for Sustainability Education in Hong Kong

Higher education has been increasingly regarded as a critical venue for achieving the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (O’Malley 2020). More importantly, higher education institutions (HEIs) are taking responsibility for promoting sustainability ideas and practices to the young generations through teaching and learning (Levesque and Wake 2021) and the general society through their service and impact to the communities and societies.
In this sense, the Hong Kong public higher education sector has been well recognized in integrating sustainability into institutional strategies and practices. In 2010, eight University Grants Committee (UGC)-funded public universities established the Hong Kong Sustainable Campus Consortium (HKSCC) to coordinate the efforts of eight institutions in promoting sustainability on campuses (Xiong and Mok 2020). However, many sustainability efforts of the Hong Kong higher education sector primarily focus on environmental management at the institutional level. Therefore, much attention is expected to the integration of sustainability into teaching and learning in both formal and informal contexts. A holistic framework of sustainability education should be created to inform students’ learning and faculty’s professional development.
To explore a holistic framework of transforming higher education teaching and learning for sustainability, this study takes the Hong Kong public universities as the case due to their good performance in the institutional-level efforts. Specifically, this study aims to propose a holistic framework to transform higher education teaching and learning and finally realize the goal of higher education for sustainable development (HESD).