Sustainability in your course

Music Business

Sostenuto aims to confront the sustainability challenges facing the music business industry and create opportunities for students to experience best practice in sustainability throughout the Music Business Course teaching and assessment to be able to influence for change.

Professional experiences for students have included student teams leading on practical carbon footprint analysis with Download Festival.

Digital Marketing

Tapping the commercial advantage of sustainability is an important skill for business students and organisations of all stripes including our university. Students responded to assessed research briefs exploring how the University could better market its sustainability expertise to different stakeholder groups. The University’s pioneering ‘Who Cares?’ campaign to ditch the printed prospectus formed an example of how this can happen in creative communications.

Accounting and Finance

Future Accountants need to be able to make business decisions with the planet and people in mind as well as profit.

As part of their Social and Environmental Accounting module, Students reviewed a variety of company sustainability reports (including our own annual sustainability report). Their task was to look critically at how well businesses are performing against the triple bottom line of environment, society and economy and how we assess the true costs of doing business.

Events Management

Student teams developed an interactive pop-up family event at Cheltenham Jazz Festival as an assessed part of their Event Design and Production module themed on the United Nations Global Sustainable Development Goals. The project won ‘Student Event of the Year’ at the National Outdoor Events Association awards, was cited in a UN report and was given a recognition award in 2018 by the global RCE network. Watch our event film.

Graphic Design

As part of the national ‘Briefcases‘ scheme, led by corporate sustainability movers and shakers at the Heaven Company, students helped high street businesses to consider how to improve visual and packaging communications to maximise their sustainability value and business potential in an age of online shopping.

Two students were celebrated at the national Solutions Awards in 2018 for their projects, winning bronze and silver.

English Language and Linguistics

Underpinned by ecolinguistics principles, this module and online course accompanies the English curriculum experience, exploring how language, stories and visual images encourage people to protect or destroy the environment. This learning experience is offered online to people across the world to enrich the insights and share dialogue on how we can all reframe our ideas about sustainability and how we can support it.

Criminology

Students tested systems thinking in action as they researched the application of criminological theory in practice, in this community learning project working with local residents to collaborate on real change that makes people feel safer, happier and more connected within their local environments. They worked with local communities to monitor and prevent crime by taking positive action through litter pick events and flower potting with local partners.

Product Design

Students in Product Design focus on designing for a circular economy where resources are kept in use as a long as possible, products are not designed to be obsolete quickly and add to global waste, and designs support wellbeing and are inclusive to all.

Students regularly submit their work to the national New Designers Awards and in 2018 two students were selected as winners for their innovative projects.

Photojournalism and Documentary Photography

Students worked with staff and the local community to engage in an exploratory, reflective journey of understanding the movement of people and its impacts on society, through the lens of photography. Students also worked with the Course Lead to co-create new approaches to their project brief and to inform the assessment criteria. The projects outputs were shared through local exhibitions and an online platform and picture gallery.

Performing Arts and Media

Students developed an innovative and immersive multimedia storytelling methodology on the theme of ‘survival’. They created narratives around key issues to help understand and improve prospects for more sustainable futures, working with young people through a local youth theatre group. The project created education resources and workshop methods that can be used for training and education in wider community activities.