Economics

Classroom Resource: Sustainability Solutions and Writing Assignments

students exploring sustainability solutions
Professor in the School of Business, Catrina McBride inspires her Communications, Level II students to explore sustainability solutions that might be appropriate for Algonquin College to undertake.

Through a series of writing assignments, students learn from business leader Ray Anderson in his book Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, while developing their skills in summarizing content, writing with persuasion, and conveying research findings and recommendations in a final summary report. The culminating performance for the course is a group project and report that is evaluated on its organization, use of the indirect strategy, appendix, style, mechanics, format, and APA referencing.

Oral communications and presentation skills are also brought into the mix as the groups of students get to interact with Algonquin College community members during a Spring Sustainability Day hosted in Student Commons.Students working on their Oral communications and presentation skills

A series of lesson plans and accompanying assessment rubrics map out student learning in this course and are available in the myAC group for collaboration around sustainability, innovation and Indigenous practices relevant to curriculum delivery.

Photos of the poster presentations are available at:
Sustainability Day 2018
Sustainability Day 2017
Sustainability Day 2016

Video Resource: Lean Burrito

The “Lean Burrito” video from Paul Akers is included in Introduction to Sustainability, Part II.

Paul Akers has additional videos on the topic of lean as well as other resources on his website.

Integrated topics: Lean, continuous improvement, innovation, entrepreneurship, Responsibility Centred Management

Conversation Starter: Does sustainability come at a cost?

What are the interesting questions that have come up in your office around the topic of sustainability?

While all Algonquin College employees may not be in a position to provide an answer to all questions, Conversation Starters are here to help employees start a dialogue.

This question, “Does sustainability come at a cost?” is very broad and can be phrased in many ways: “What is the business case for sustainability?” “Does going green mean I need to spend more?”, etc.

Stay tuned for a few starting points to get the conversation going on this topic.