Integrating sustainability into our curriculum

At our University, we're dedicated to embedding sustainability into every course. We collaborate with students and staff on various projects to support their sustainability journey.

The Green Heron audit

Recently, we assisted students in the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Social Care to undertake an audit of how and where sustainability was being integrated within their modules. Modules which were found to be explicitly integrating sustainability were awarded a Green Heron badge. The badge can be displayed on Canvas, the learning management system our students use.

The Green Heron audit is a student-led research project that helps students assess and identify opportunities to enhance their curriculum. This initiative has been particularly successful, empowering students to tackle sustainability challenges in their industry. It not only develops their sustainability knowledge but also enhances skills such as research, collaboration, interviewing, auditing, and teamwork, while creating valuable sustainable content for courses. Students involved in the audit gain digital badges to recognise the skills they have developed.

Students also create a bank of sustainability resources as part of the audit, supporting lecturers and raising awareness of how sustainability is relevant to their module. We are now expanding the Green Heron initiative to all faculties, aiming to inspire more student trailblazers across the university and award Green Heron badges to more modules that successfully integrate sustainability.

The Green Heron audit is adapted from the Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC), an internationally recognised metric-based tool for evaluating and improving students’ sustainability learning. While the Green Heron audit is specifically tailored to our curriculum, the PHRC covers five sections: curriculum, research, outreach and advocacy, student-led initiatives, and campus sustainability. The remarkable efforts of our students in conducting the Green Heron audit have laid a strong foundation for future groups to undertake the full PHRC audit.

This year, we are completing our first PHRC, which will be published internationally. This achievement will provide our students with the opportunity to engage with an international organisation and promote ARU as a university dedicated to enhancing and celebrating its sustainability efforts alongside universities worldwide.

Get involved

If you're passionate about making a difference and want to help integrate sustainability into your curriculum, we can support both students and staff with the Green Heron or the PHRC.

Please contact us at [email protected].