Core Program contributes to achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) through its goals, aims, and educational approach. The program is designed to equip students with knowledge, skills, and values contributing to a peaceful and sustainable world. The compulsory and elective courses, offered in the fall and spring semesters, integrate various topics into their curriculum to increase students’ awareness of poverty, hunger, food insecurity, environmental pollution, gender inequality, energy inefficiency, unemployment, unhealthy work conditions, industrialization, global production and consumption patterns, uncontrolled urbanization, problems about growth, and income inequality within and among the countries, as well as the solutions that people and societies have introduced to overcome these challenges. The courses delve into historical, social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of these challenges and solutions. In encouraging interdisciplinary and multilevel analyses, the courses provide analytical and critical perspectives that would enable students to think about the causes, evolution, and transformation of these complex processes and to seek solutions to mitigate their impact on the present and future of the world.
Our aim is not only to equip students with intellectual knowledge but also to stress their agency and ethical responsibility in an interdependent world. The courses underline the role that we play in shaping and reshaping these processes as entrepreneurs, professionals, consumers, and citizens, and foster a critical and self-reflexive perspective that encourage students to use this knowledge and expertise in their future careers. Whereas some courses are entirely designed to enable a creative, participatory, and meaningful engagement of the students with these challenges, others integrate this goal in their classroom settings, learning outcomes, and assessment and evaluation criteria that push students to think individually and as a group on particular cases. Our approach is based on an inclusive and equitable education, in which students are not passive recipients of information but active participants who learn how to find reliable information, analyze the data, and use it for specific purposes. The courses are cooperative efforts of instructors and students and are continuously evaluated and reshaped with the feedback we receive from each group.
Core Program’s purpose, philosophy, and operational structure inherently support the achievement of the SDGs by disseminating an awareness of the key aspects of the SDGs, fostering ethical responsibility that would guide the students’ lifelong conduct, enabling student participation in learning processes, and equipping students with knowledge, expertise, and skills to overcome the challenges to the SDGs.
Kadir Has University / Courses on Sustainable Development Goals: Education on SDGs – KHAS Impact