In May 2012, two major earthquakes, of magnitudes 6.1 and 5.8, rocked northern Italy. The epicentre of the first was near the medieval town of Mirandola, home to historic palazzos, churches, and “biomedical valley”, a business park that housed more than 100 biomedical companies, and employed 5,000 people.
The quakes left thousands homeless, and had far-reaching consequences that were even felt by hospitals, health professionals and patients in the UK. Two factories that produced tubes for dialysis machines were badly affected, and hospitals prepared for a global shortage. “The Department of Health issued a medical device alert to say that there was a problem with supply,” says Janet Richardson, a professor of health service research at the University of Plymouth. “This affected 50% of intensive care units in the UK.”
At the university, these earthquakes are used as a case study for nursing students to demonstrate the complex links between natural disasters and the UK healthcare system. Richardson says it has been particularly successful in exposing students to sustainability and climate change in a way that is relevant. “We previously had lectures where we’d put up photographs of polar bears on melting ice caps, but that didn’t really connect,” she says. “We now have sustainability threaded through the nursing and midwifery curriculum.”
Nursing and midwifery aren’t the only subjects at the university suffused with sustainability. In June, students from the publishing, illustration, documentary photography and English with creative writing courses travelled to the European Parliament in Brussels to raise awareness about the critically endangered European eel. They exhibited their work, “a suitably absurd and eel-centric guide to Brusseels”, at an event organised by the Sustainable Eel Group charity.
“We give our students a lot of freedom to work on issues that are important to them,” says John Kilburn, a lecturer on the BA (Hons) illustration programme at Plymouth. “The eel project was one of several we introduced to our students during the year-two Interpreting Information module. Students start the module off by working in groups on projects related to local and/or ethical organisations under the working theme of ‘sustainability in the south-west’.”
Paul Warwick, who leads the university’s Centre for Sustainable Futures (CSF) – set up in 2005 with funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England – says the university has a long tradition of comprehensively integrating sustainability into its teaching and learning, research and campus operations. “The vision of CSF is to encourage curriculum innovation and development that inspires students to be ‘change-leaders’, using their care for the wellbeing of others, along with growing subject expertise, to make a difference – by improving local, national, and global communities,” he says. “Whatever the discipline – architecture, graphic communication, illustration, nursing or theatre and performance studies – there is no subject in which apt and engaging links to the challenge of sustainability cannot be discovered.”
Paul Murray, who is co-founder of the CSF, came to the university in the mid-90s to set up a new subject area: sustainable construction. His mandate, even at that time, was to build environmental concerns into the undergraduate surveying and architecture degrees. “When we set up these new degrees, they were all overtly environmentally themed,” he says. About eight years later, he adds, he was awarded £50,000 through a national teaching fellowship (NTF), and dedicated much of that money to updating the courses to reflect how the green agenda had changed – from only being concerned with the environment to encompassing broader sustainability concerns.
Like Richardson, Murray found that students were more engaged with sustainability if the examples were personal and relevant to them. “That really struck a chord with me,” says Murray. He used a portion of the NTF award to carry out research and develop training “to get people to really think about sustainable development and what it meant to them”. His “values-centred” training courses have since been completed by over 1,500 people, including students, teachers, government workers, business people and charity-based professionals. And his book, The Sustainable Self, is used by Plymouth teaching staff and many other academics around the world.
With headline-grabbing stories about climate change ever more frequent and alarming, it comes as no surprise that students demand a commitment to sustainable development from their universities. According to the People & Planet University League, a high proportion of students – 82% – rate sustainability as important, and 68% say they are acquiring knowledge and skills about it while studying. The 2017 league table shows a marked rise in the number of universities embedding sustainability into the curriculum, with 130 of the 154 institutions surveyed taking steps to prepare students for environmental challenges. Plymouth scores 100% in the education for sustainable development section.
Phil Crossley, who graduated from Plymouth in 2014 with an MSc in sustainable construction project management, says Plymouth’s commitment to sustainability within the curriculum is second to none. “There are construction sustainability experts, such as Paul Murray, leading specific areas supported by a team of lecturers who equally understand, embrace and pass on sustainability as an integral part of modern construction,” he explains.
Both Richardson and Murray are in the running for Green Gown Awards this year, which celebrate the green commitments and initiatives of universities and colleges. Richardson’s NurSus Toolkit, a resource to help healthcare professionals and educators integrate sustainability into the healthcare system, is a finalist in the “next generation learning and skills” category, and also won the Guardian University Award for Sustainability 2018, while Murray is up for “sustainability champion – staff”.
Their sustainability-centric approach is already yielding results. “We’ve got some fantastic students,” says Richardson, citing a nursing student who has set up a sustainability initiative in a children’s ward at Derriford hospital in Plymouth, and another who has set up a garden project. “These are really good student ambassadors who are going out in practice and taking this forward.”
