Empathy and sustainability education beyond business as usual

Abstract

Although empathy is a crucial component of sustainability, the literature on relevant teaching practices within business education remains limited. Aiming to encourage critical thinking regarding stakeholders, we introduced a teaching practice structured around three activities—an innovation camp, a seminar, and a game-based workshop—in an introductory course about innovation. Data collection encompassed teacher observations, dialogues with student assistants, student-generated artifacts, reports, and survey responses. The findings showed some indications of sustainability empathy and learning, primarily manifesting as first-order learning, with improvements focused on “doing things better” within the existing dominant paradigm.