Sustainability education through active learning and authentic assessment

This chapter introduces how a new teaching tool for sustainability, the Sustainability Mindset Indicator, Kolb’s experiential learning cycle and the concepts of authentic assessment can be combined to dynamically develop sustainability related courses. The case of a Sustainable Supply Chain Management course demonstrates how active learning interventions prepare students for assessments that are authentic in the sense that they represent complex cognitive challenges, meaningful real-world context, that they require holistic student performance as well as knowledge transfer, and offer opportunities for metacognition and self-assessment. The chapter discusses this teaching approach, lessons learned and provides recommendations on how interested educators may prepare themselves for the application of this approach.