Balancing the Disciplines: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Sustainability Curriculum Content

This paper explores appropriate disciplinary content for generalist sustainability degrees, based on two recent surveys. A questionnaire was used to extract from a multidisciplinary, largely academic audience – all of whom share an interest in sustainability – their views as to the disciplinary knowledge that a university-based sustainability education should include. This was undertaken because the current focus in sustainability education literature on generic skills and pedagogical method provides little insight to assist curriculum developers with disciplinary content. While the sample was limited, respondents came from a diverse group of disciplines and thus supply a broad perspective to curriculum design. Recommended teaching methods were also captured, for both undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as the academic backgrounds of the participants for the purposes of investigating bias. The findings were compared with curricula from existing Australian coursework programs and showed that a slight rebalancing towards the human sphere is necessary.