King's College London

Education for Sustainability (EfS) and Cultural Competency (CC) are increasingly being recognised as essential forms of learning to tackle two of the most pressing and complex issues of the contemporary world: the climate crisis, and forms of intercultural hostility and identitarian conflict. These two issues are interlinked: the effects of the climate crisis disproportionately fall on communities who have contributed the least to its main drivers; and cultural incompetency, such as identitarian conflict, is exacerbated by resource scarcity, flooding, and food insecurity. Embedding EfS and CC in the university curriculum is a potentially powerful way these issues can be addressed.

There are many similarities between EfS and CC. They each share an emphasis on learning that is interdisciplinary, problem focused, creative, and that spans a person’s knowledge, skills, values, and competencies. They are both strategic priorities at King’s, being central to the Climate and Sustainability Action Plan and the Internationalisation 2029 strategy. EfS and CC have ambitions to be embedded in the curriculum at King’s, in both core modules and in bespoke stand-alone modules — indeed, CC has begun to take these latter steps with its recently launched levels 5 and 6 cross-College student modules and its staff-focused module.

Given these interconnections, this project explores what might be gained by more closely linking EfS and CC, and how this might be implemented at King’s.

The project’s hypothesis is that CC and EfS can each benefit from a sharing of local experience, expertise and methodological approaches — but that also there is value in a shared exploration of how to effectively engender each form of learning, both locally at King’s and for the international scholarly community. Learning to put cultural competency into practise and developing the capacity to enact transformative sustainable development can and should go hand in hand.

Image: Lawrence Makoona on Unsplash