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Awardee(s)
Dr. Laura Steele
Queen's Business School, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom
Dr. Claire May
Lincoln International Business School, University of Lincoln
How has your work advanced the SDGs and responsible management education?
Our work has advanced the SDGs and responsible management education (RME) by creating a sustained, practical mechanism for embedding ethics, sustainability, and responsible leadership into business and management teaching. Through the PRME Chapter UK & Ireland Innovative Pedagogy Competition, we have supported educators to move beyond rhetorical commitment to PRME and develop innovative, applied teaching practices that engage students with real-world social, environmental, and ethical challenges. Since 2020, the competition has funded 21 projects across the UK and Ireland, each required to demonstrate alignment with PRME and benefit beyond the award holder’s institution.
The funded projects have advanced SDG 4 Quality Education while also addressing SDGs including SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities, SDG 12 Responsible Consumption and Production, SDG 13 Climate Action, SDG 14 Life Below Water, SDG 15 Life on Land, SDG 16 Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, and SDG 17Partnerships for the Goals. Collectively, they have generated open-access teaching resources, interdisciplinary curricula, games, case studies, workshops, and experiential learning tools that help educators integrate the SDGs meaningfully into student learning and institutional practice.
How has your work promoted student skill development?
Our work has promoted student skill development by supporting pedagogies that require students to practise responsible management, rather than simply learn about it. The competition has funded projects that foreground active, experiential, interdisciplinary, and reflective learning, enabling students to develop capabilities such as ethical deliberation, systems thinking, stakeholder analysis, collaboration, critical reflection, sustainable decision-making, and responsible leadership.
Winning projects have engaged students with complex issues including biodiversity loss, migration and displacement, carbon markets, sustainable careers, responsible finance and law, enterprise education, and climate-related decision-making. These approaches ask students to work through ambiguity, negotiate competing values, analyse stakeholder perspectives, and propose practical solutions to real-world problems. Several projects also involve co-creation with students, external partners, SMEs, community organisations, or interdisciplinary teams, helping students build employability-relevant skills alongside sustainability literacy.
By encouraging educators to design learning experiences around authentic challenges and reflective practice, our work helps students develop the confidence, judgement, and practical capabilities needed to become responsible decision-makers and changemakers in their future organisations and communities.
How might this be a useful model for others?
This work offers a useful model for others because it shows how modest seed funding, carefully structured support, and community-based dissemination can generate meaningful pedagogical innovation at scale. The competition is deliberately replicable: it combines a clear application process, transparent criteria, promotional support, launch webinars, peer judging, constructive feedback, interim reporting, final reporting, and the sharing of resources through open-access platforms.
Its strength lies not only in funding individual projects, but in creating an ecosystem that supports educators before, during, and after innovation. Previous winners are invited to present their work, contribute to judging, and share lessons with the wider PRME community, creating a cycle of recognition, development, peer learning, and continual improvement. The model also requires funded projects to produce benefits beyond the home institution, ensuring that innovation is transferable rather than isolated.
Other institutions, PRME Chapters, disciplinary networks, or academic development units could adapt this model to stimulate responsible management education, build faculty capacity, reward pedagogical experimentation, and create shared resources that support curriculum transformation across contexts.
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