The Ecollaborative: Teaching Sustainability Through Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

The Ecollaborative is an interdisciplinary course where teams of students from business, industrial design, and environmental studies create or redesign a product for a corporate client using principles of sustainable design and development. Three aspects of this course make it valuable to students: the use of critical pedagogy, a collaborative approach to innovation management (across disciplines and organizations), and a real-world context. The resulting learning experience empowers students to move beyond discipline-specific models of new product development and to use principles of sustainability to drive innovation.