Title : Beyond business as usual: Advancing ethical sustainability education through indigenous knowledge, industry engagement, and real-world impact
Abstract:
What if sustainability education did more than teach students about global challenges and instead placed them inside those challenges and asked them to lead? The Corporate Sustainability Immersion project (MGMT6085) is a transformative postgraduate model that reimagines business education by moving beyond theory and conventional analysis. It addresses a persistent gap in business programs: students often learn sustainability frameworks without experiencing the ethical, cultural, environmental, and organisational complexity of applying them in authentic contexts. The project responds by integrating academic learning with immersive, industry-connected, and community-engaged experiences across Western Australia.
Central to the project is Indigenous knowledge, cultural authenticity, and ethical stewardship. Students develop a business report using the 3P approach—planet, people, and profit—to examine an industry or community sustainability issue in Western Australia and identify relevant Indigenous perspectives. They then produce a five-minute professional video presenting the problem, solution, and recommendations, followed by an AI-free debate in which they argue, defend, and justify the report’s key arguments.
A collaborative profile assessment is also implemented in class, enabling students to examine real cases from local and global perspectives. Working individually or in teams, students present their findings in three slides structured around “what, why, and how,” strengthening their ability to analyse problems, explain significance, and propose practical responses. These activities connect sustainability theory with applied learning, professional communication, and evidence-based decision-making.
Using a mixed-methods, practice-based educational research approach, the project evaluates learning through formal feedback, survey responses, and evidence of capability development. The guiding research question is: How can immersive, ethically grounded, real-world sustainability learning transform postgraduate students’ professional capability, ethical reasoning, and global readiness? Findings show that learning deepens when sustainability theory is tested against authentic practice. Students report stronger sustainability literacy, analytical thinking, professional confidence, collaboration, and capacity to respond to complex organisational problems with ethical clarity.
The dual-context design, engaging students with community partners and institutional stakeholders, creates a learning journey from local responsibility to global readiness. Student feedback reinforces this impact. One student reflected that “MGMT6085 challenged me to think beyond the traditional business perspective and consider the broader impact of decisions on people, the planet, and long-term sustainability.” Other feedback described the teaching style as “very engaging” and supportive of active participation.
The model is ambitious and resource-intensive, requiring strong partnerships, coordination, institutional support, and collaboration across faculties, industries, communities, and cultural knowledge holders. While AI supports communication and ideation, continued monitoring is needed to protect academic integrity as digital technologies evolve.
Future research will examine long-term graduate outcomes, cross-faculty adoption, and AI-resilient assessment. Planned developments include a university-wide sustainability innovation hub, external funding, and dissemination through journals and international conferences.
Overall, the project offers a scalable, evidence-based blueprint for postgraduate business education. By fusing theory with action, Indigenous knowledge with ethical leadership, and local engagement with global capability, it prepares graduates to understand sustainability and practise it with courage, cultural competence, and professional purpose.
