Toward Identifying Sustainability Leadership Competencies: Insights from Mapping a Graduate Sustainability Education Curriculum

Abstract

Graduate sustainability programs are tasked with educating and preparing the next generation of leaders to address the causes and effects of global climate change. As the urgency of addressing sustainability challenges like climate change has grown, including through higher education sustainability education, so has the attention on the competencies students ought to master to become sustainability leaders. Yet little is known about which sustainability leadership competencies are critical to bring about change or how curricula are addressing them. We used course descriptions from the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, to identify the sustainability leadership competencies targeted across its historically successful graduate curriculum, along with faculty members’ associated cognitive processing expectations following Bloom’s Taxonomy. The programs’ courses varied in the extent to which they addressed ten leadership competencies but were consistent in terms of associated cognitive processing expectations. We recommend that other sustainability education programs similarly examine their curricula and ensure that students regardless of their specializations have the opportunity to graduate with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to affect change.

1. Introduction

Climate change poses severe threats to a sustainable future. From global disease circulation [1] to local coastal saltwater intrusion [2], effects will be felt across scales and geographies [3]. To address these increasingly urgent issues, future leaders need to master sustainability concepts and apply them to local and global contexts [3,4]. To address the growing need for these so-called sustainability ‘change agents’ to guide society to a more sustainable future, degree programs in sustainability are becoming more common [5,6,7,8]. These higher education sustainability programs come in many forms and vary based on curricular focus and faculty expertise, fluctuating between the environment, climate, energy, and the more encompassing construct of sustainability [7,9]. However, regardless of the specific sustainability competencies students graduate with, there is agreement that they will need sustainability leadership skills to implement effective solutions [10,11].

Graduates of sustainability programs should not only be knowledgeable in their topical area of focus but also capable of bringing about societal change. This is particularly true for graduate degree holders who are likely to hold leadership positions throughout their careers. Ensuring graduate students master leadership competencies may be just as important as acquiring more general sustainability competencies [5,6]. Efforts are currently underway to establish accreditation for sustainability programs, to recognize graduates who have mastered the competencies for a career in the field [12,13]. When, where, and how leadership competencies are taught may also have implications for students’ effectiveness in deploying their leadership [10,14]. Future leaders will be required to tackle problems for which there are no blueprints nor consensus on solutions [10]. To become effective change agents, it will therefore be critical that they are able to engage with higher-order cognitive processing (i.e., Bloom’s Taxonomy: analyze, evaluate, create) [14,15]. Unfortunately, what sustainability competencies are critical, and how they are integrated into sustainability and climate change education curricula remains poorly understood [11,16]. This issue may be exacerbated by the fact that the specializations sustainability programs offer cover a wide range of sustainability topics [9]. Although different specializations provide students the opportunity to tailor their coursework, these may not all equally expose students to essential leadership competencies.

Thus, identifying which sustainability leadership competencies to target across curricula is an urgent challenge for contemporary higher education. To help address these gaps, we set out to answer two key research questions: (1) What type of sustainability leadership competencies are targeted across a historically successful Master’s sustainability curriculum, how and to what extent? and (2) At what level of cognitive process (by way of Bloom’s Taxonomy) are leadership competencies fostered across the same curriculum? To answer these questions, we investigated the Master’s degree curriculum at the University of Michigan’s (UM) School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). While this article appears in a special issue on climate change leadership pedagogy, we focus instead on sustainability leadership more broadly, as it is the change-making of these types of sustainability leaders that will shape the collective response to climate change for the next generation. Based on examining the curriculum’s course descriptions across SEAS’ eight different specializations, we bring attention to ten key leadership competencies. The type and number of leadership competencies targeted in courses varied by specialization and course (requirement) type. The required foundational core courses required of all students ranked highest in their focus on leadership competencies, and some specializations would particularly benefit from increasing their focus on sustainability leadership development within their courses. Surprisingly, we did not find a significant correlation between a focus on leadership competencies and higher cognitive processing levels, possibly because our data were obtained from course descriptions.

Educating students for sustainability leadership can be contextualized in Lattuca and Stark’s [17] framework of academic plans in a sociocultural setting. This framework positions competencies in broader institutional academic plans in a two-way process: socio-historical movements (e.g., climate change and resulting injustices) influence academic plans (educating students to become sustainability change agents) while the academic plans lead to the articulation of sustainability leadership competencies for students to master. In other words, a socio-historical conceptualization of sustainability and the rise in interest to develop sustainability leaders inform the selection of competencies within an academic plan. In this vein, our approach to identify and map leadership competencies across courses within a single curriculum should be useful to other sustainability programs aiming to assess and improve their leadership education for sustainability.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Infusing Leadership into Sustainability Curricula

Since its adoption by the Bruntland Commission [18], the term sustainable development and its three-dimensional approach to sustainability (environment, economy, equity) has revolutionized environmental governance, planning, and management. This has also impacted higher education, where environment and sustainability programs have proliferated [7,8,19,20,21]. In fact, these programs continue to grow and evolve rapidly [9]. One key emerging trend within higher education sustainability education is a greater focus on leadership development [10,11].

We define a sustainability leader generally as “someone who inspires and supports action towards a better world” [22,23] and who must have “expertise in both scientific thinking and taking real-world actions” [22,24]. Sustainability leadership education emerges from the long tradition of leadership education [25,26,27] and the study of environmental leadership [28], though it is unclear to what degree sustainability leadership education matches definitions put forth by these fields because we lack a clear delineation of the subject matter. Much of the reason for this uncertainty is the broad and often conflicting use of the term sustainability leadership, even within the context of education. For instance, in some articles, authors highlight the importance of developing future sustainability leaders, often in their introductions or conclusions, but do not define or discuss what competencies emerging sustainability leaders ought to have (e.g., [29,30,31,32]). This uncertainty is particularly problematic considering the dramatic growth in sustainability leadership education. In fact, as of 2013, MacDonald and Shriberg [10] identified over 60 sustainability leadership programs. In a world that desperately needs sustainability change agents, it is so far unclear what knowledge, skills, and attitudes, higher education should or is seeking to impart to the next generation of sustainability leaders.

2.2. Leadership as a Sustainability Competency

The vague framing of leadership common within the sustainability education literature also applies within the context of the sustainability competency literature, where leadership also lacks consistent conceptualization. A competence, broadly defined, is “a complex combination of knowledge, skills, understanding, values, attitudes, and desires which lead to effective, embodied human action in the world, in a particular domain” [33] (p. 313). One recent definition conceptualizes sustainability competencies as “the entirety of individual dispositions comprising knowledge, skills, motives, and attitudes necessary to solve sustainability-related problems and advancing sustainable development in a range of different contexts, including private, social and institutional” [12]. Although there is a dominant sustainability framework present in higher education sustainability literature (c.f. [34]), many academic sustainability programs are creating their own set of competencies to define the specific learning outcomes that their respective students should graduate with (e.g., University of South Dakota; [35]).

While a unanimous definition is lacking across sustainability competencies in higher education—throughout both research and practice—there is an emergent agreement that they consist of clusters of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that graduates ought to master [36,37,38,39]. For example, Chalkley [40] states, “higher education’s most valuable contribution to sustainability lies in providing large numbers of graduates with the knowledge, skills, and values that enable business, government and society as a whole to progress towards more sustainable ways of living and working” (p. 235).

While there are some sustainability competency frameworks that do not address leadership, many do. Our literature review identified three distinct ways in which leadership is either explicitly or implicitly incorporated into sustainability competency frameworks (Figure 1).

Some frameworks center sustainability leadership, with numerous competencies and sub-competencies all focused on leadership (see Figure 1a; [16,41]). For example, to enable leadership for sustainable development, Missimer and Connell [16] identify three leadership competencies (ways of thinking, working with others, and professional skills), with numerous sub-competencies associated with each of these. Moreover, the sub-competencies under “working with others” are: inspiring a shared vision; teamwork; working in multicultural (diverse) settings; networking, building alliances; participatory skills, decision making; conflict resolution skills/consensus building; communication skills; focusing on the process, dialogue, listening; enabling/motivating others to act/participate; and catalyzing/managing change. In another sustainability leadership competency model, Knight and Paterson [41] list five leadership-specific competencies: visionary thinker; change agent; inclusive operator; ethically oriented; and results-driven. Like Missimmer and Connell’s [16] framework, each of these competencies has several sub-competencies. For example, the sub-competencies for “visionary thinker” are: developing strategies; pursuing goals; providing insights; and exploring possibilities. This approach of leadership-centric sustainability competency frameworks, however, is less common than sustainability competency frameworks that include leadership as one particular component.

Some of these latter frameworks include leadership along with other cognitive-based competencies (see Figure 1b; [42,43]). Under this one sustainability leadership competency, they then offer several leadership-specific sub-competencies. For example, Hull et al. (2016) suggest three overarching competencies: collaborative problem-solving skills (which is implicitly a leadership competency; [16,44]) cultural competencies; and sustainable development theories. Under the one leadership-focused competency of collaborative problem-solving skills, they suggest sub-competencies in collaboration, project management, and leadership.

Lastly, in other sustainability competency frameworks, leadership is framed as a sub-competency of a broader competency (Figure 1c). Wiek et al.’s [34] framework, the most cited within the sustainability education competencies literature [12,34], is illustrative of this particular approach. Wiek et al. [34] stipulate five overarching competencies: systems-thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic, and interpersonal, with leadership identified as a sub-competency of the latter. Wiek et al.’s [34] influence on sustainability competencies scholarship, may also help to explain why other frameworks include leadership as a subset of interpersonal competency, along with collaboration and teamwork skills [45,46].

Taken together, these three approaches to how sustainability leadership is framed as part of sustainability competency frameworks demonstrate the variation in conceptualizations. It is also important to note that not all sustainability competency frameworks explicitly include leadership, despite the pressing need for sustainability change agents. To reiterate, there does not appear to be a common definition or conception of leadership within the field of sustainability, suggesting an opportunity to develop a shared and more precise understanding.

3. Conceptual Framework

Two frameworks guided our study: sustainability leadership competencies derived from existing literature on the topic and levels of cognitive processing by way of Bloom’s Taxonomy. We deployed these frameworks hierarchically, with sustainability leadership competencies as our primary framework, and Bloom’s Taxonomy as secondary. The sustainability leadership competencies we ultimately identified should be considered preliminary because they have their basis in largely theoretical work and a single graduate sustainability degree program, while Bloom’s Taxonomy is well-established and validated.

3.1. Sustainability Leadership Competencies

The sustainability competency literature has not resulted in agreed-upon competencies, including leadership competencies. Nonetheless, several articles have proposed leadership competencies as part of their respective sustainability competency frameworks [12,16,34,41,43,44,45,46,47,48]. We employed the list of the leadership-specific competencies culled from this existing scholarly work as a departure point for our exploratory study of sustainability leadership competencies across one Master’s level sustainability curriculum (Table 2).

3.2. Bloom’s Taxonomy

One of the many ways to operationalize academic rigor in higher education is in terms of cognitive complexity expectations [49]. Cognitive complexity is conceptualized in terms of the demonstration of higher-order thinking [49,50,51]. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a hierarchical model designating learning into levels of complexity and is often used to structure course experiences such as learning objectives, assessments, and pedagogical choices.

Bloom et al.’s [52] most recent taxonomy outlines six levels of increasing cognitive complexity: remember (recalling basic facts and concepts), understand (explaining ideas or concepts), apply (using information in new situations), analyze (drawing connections between ideas), evaluate (justifying a decision or stance), and create (producing a new idea or work; [45,46]). According to this framework, certain cognitive tasks demand lower levels of complexity, like repeating back course ideas (remembering) or indicating the literal meaning of main points (understanding). Other tasks demand higher-order cognitive processes, like critiquing an argument grounded in a certain perspective (evaluating) or developing new hypotheses that build off earlier work (creating; [50]).

Table 1. A fictitious example of employing Bloom’s Taxonomy to teach students about climate change adaptation.

Level	Example
Remember	Students can recognize and recall the contributing factors to climate change, such as the sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
Understand	Students can summarize the key points of a climate change adaptation plan, such as vulnerability and monitoring change.
Apply	Students can apply a climate change adaptation framework to a real-world location and set of problems.
Analyze	Students can analyze data on rising sea levels to identify plausible mitigation efforts for coastal communities.
Evaluate	Students can critique components of a climate change adaptation plan, such as when to employ a new suite of adaptation strategies.
Create	Students can employ climate change adaptation frameworks to make predications, such as how various climate projections will impact agricultural yields.

provides an example of employing Bloom’s Taxonomy to understand climate change adaptation, demonstrating the need for higher-level cognitive processing for effective change-making.

Although there are critiques of higher-order thinking frameworks such as Bloom’s Taxonomy [53], we used Bloom’s Taxonomy to inform our work because prior scholarship demonstrates that leadership requires higher-order levels of cognitive processes [14,15]. While there is limited associated research within the context of sustainability leadership education, Bloom’s Taxonomy has been usefully employed to inform graduate-level curricula [54]. For instance, Bloom’s Taxonomy has been used to guide graduate-level course design and assessment [55] as a way to guide students in demonstrating their cognitive processing of subject matter [56]. Additionally, this framework has been used to assess written learning outcomes [57] and syllabi [58], to determine the level of cognitive processing required of students.

3.3. The Intersection of Sustainability Leadership Competencies and Bloom’s Taxonomy

While some have used Bloom’s Taxonomy [52] to examine leadership development [15], including in the higher education context [59], and used this framework to explore sustainability in higher education [60,61], we are not aware of scholars who have used it to investigate students’ learning of sustainability leadership. More importantly, we felt a proven validated framework like Bloom’s Taxonomy was critical to complement our exploratory sustainability leadership competencies garnered from the literature.

Furthermore, there are several noteworthy distinctions between the two frameworks (i.e., sustainability leadership competencies and Bloom’s Taxonomy). Bloom’s Taxonomy focuses largely on the cognitive learning domain (like other sustainability competency frameworks such as Wiek et al. [34]), while the sustainability leadership competencies framework integrates cognitive (knowledge), affective (attitudes), and behavioral (skills) dimensions [37,38,39]. Another distinction between these two frameworks is the structure. Bloom’s Taxonomy is hierarchical and posits that with each increasing level of complexity, students are engaged on a deeper cognitive level. While scholars suggest that quality education ought to span across all six levels, the ultimate goal is to ensure that students learn to create (i.e., the highest level; [50]). On the contrary, sustainability leadership competencies are typically organized as being of equal weight and value. We propose that the two frameworks, in combination, are needed to provide insight into the breadth (i.e., competencies) and depth (i.e., cognitive processing) of sustainability leadership education. Moreover, this breadth and depth likely varies across interdisciplinary sustainability education curricula [4]. Prior research has found that fields such as the natural sciences focus on lower cognitive complexity than, for example, the humanities [50]. As an interdisciplinary school, most SEAS’ “specializations” can be associated with disciplinary fields, implying that differences in cognitive processing (and therefore leadership education) might manifest across specializations. Our study assesses the presence of sustainability leadership competencies across different SEAS specializations as well as the level of cognitive processing sought by courses targeting these competencies. We propose that such an approach can reveal the breadth and depth of sustainability leadership education across interdisciplinary sustainability curricula.

4. Materials and Methods

4.1. Site

The University of Michigan has a long history in natural resources education dating back to 1881 when its first forestry course was offered. The School of Forestry and Conservation was created in 1927, the first such school in the country. Over time, the school transitioned to become the School of Natural Resources, the School of Natural Resources and Environment, and most recently in 2017, became the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). SEAS currently has over 10,000 living alumni, higher than any of its peer sustainability education programs working across the country and globe in a range of sustainability leadership positions. It offers multiple graduate degrees (Master of Science, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Doctor of Philosophy) as well as dual degree programs and graduate certificates. In this study, we focus on the Master of Science and of Landscape Architecture curricula, which altogether allow students to choose from eight specializations.

Both Master’s degrees are professionally focused, with no research thesis required (though some students choose to complete an individual research thesis over the group capstone project). Seven of the eight specializations (landscape architecture is the exception) have the same two SEAS foundation core course requirements, one that focuses on ecology and another on environmental social science. Four of the eight specializations have additional specialization requirements, i.e., specific courses required by that specialization. All specializations also have a list of classes students can choose from that comprise the majority of their coursework in that specialization (i.e., specialization core courses). The number of courses available in each specialization ranges from 8 to 27. All Master of Science students are also required to take a predefined number of courses from approved statistics (n = 2; requirement range = 0–1); analytics (n = 16; requirement range = 0–1); and integrated analytic methods and skills (IAMS; n = 29; requirement range = 0–2). These courses will be referred to as SEAS methods courses. Our study only included graduate courses offered through SEAS although students can also complete courses offered by other UM units to meet the requirements of select specializations. In summary, we studied four different types of courses in SEAS’ curriculum: SEAS foundation, SEAS methods, specialization requirements, and specialization core courses.

4.2. Data Analysis

All analyses were completed by the three authors, each with different disciplinary backgrounds including engineering, higher education, and natural and social science. This broad, cross-disciplinary expertise was critical for identifying core subject matter in the diverse courses across the sustainability curriculum and identifying leadership competencies within the respective disciplinary specialization contexts.

Data for this study came from qualitative text analysis of publicly available course descriptions for SEAS graduate courses downloaded from the SEAS website (https://seas.umich.edu/academics/courses; Accessed 1 June 2020; n = 123). On average, course descriptions were one paragraph in length and broadly contextualized the topic of the course in the sustainability field while summarizing central course subject matter and activities. Although the focus of this special issue is climate change leadership, we included all 123 SEAS courses in this study’s analysis regardless of explicit mention of climate change in the course description. Climate change has been identified as one of two core sustainability challenges of the 21st century [62], and society’s collective response to this challenge will be determined by the leadership of the sustainability change agents in training today. Moreover, “Climate and Energy” is one of SEAS’ five cross-cutting sustainability themes.

Data analysis was conducted in two phases, drawing on the two analytical frameworks described earlier. In phase one, we identified sustainability leadership competencies in each of the 123 course descriptions. We carried out data collection via inductive coding [63]. We (all three authors) independently read each course description and coded for key leadership-related content. We retained codes from all three coders given our unique disciplinary perspectives. After this initial coding, we thematically grouped our grounded codes into leadership competency categories based on existing sustainability competency frameworks that incorporated leadership competencies (e.g., [40,41]). In the second phase, we each scored the course descriptions for the Bloom’s Taxonomy level associated with sustainability leadership competencies. Aligned with prior studies assessing the level of cognitive processing called for by way of verbs [57] as well as course objectives, tasks, and exercises [58], scoring was confined to 25% increments on a scale from 0 to 100% [50]. For example, a course could be scored as 0% Remember, 25% Understand, 50% Apply, 25% Analyze, 0% Evaluate, and 0% Create. For each course, we retained two of three Bloom’s scores, while the outlier (the score farthest away from the other two scores) was removed. Reported scores are the mean of the two retained scores. We measured inter-coder reliability using Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient (α = 0.865) using R package ‘irr’ [64]. We calculated the Pearson correlation coefficient and performed t-tests using the ‘stats’ package to test if the type and number of sustainability leadership competencies were related to Bloom’s Taxonomy levels.

To ensure course descriptions were representative of the respective courses, we also coded for competencies in select course syllabi and compared them to those in the course descriptions. We coded a random sample of six syllabi and assessed percent agreement between syllabi and course descriptions using R software [65]. We found the final agreement between course descriptions and syllabi to be 90%, including 5% false-positive rate (found in course descriptions and not found in syllabi) and 5% false-negative rate (the inverse). Because syllabi widely varied in format, they did not provide adequate information to consistently score Bloom’s Taxonomy, so no such comparison was conducted. Given the above results, we felt confident that examining course descriptions was sufficient for our study.

We analyzed differences in sustainability leadership competencies targeted at the course and specialization level to map how these competencies are distributed across the SEAS Master’s curriculum. To do so, we used R to calculate the sum of all competencies targeted in each course and plot competencies across courses.

5. Results

To examine how sustainability leadership is incorporated across the UM SEAS Master’s curriculum, we first assessed the type and frequency of sustainability leadership competencies identified in course descriptions, followed by the associated expected levels of cognitive processing (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy).

5.1. Leadership Competencies and Distribution

Based on our review of the sustainability leadership competency literature, in conjunction with our qualitative analysis of course descriptions, we identified ten different leadership competencies present in SEAS courses across the nine specializations (

Table 2. Leadership competencies identified in the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability graduate courses.

Competency	Description	Literature Basis (Common Terms and Key Sources)
Intervening	Identifying causes, effects, and leverage points to intervene and address systemic problems.	Systems thinking, Strategic thinking [12,34,41,45,48]
Managing	Leading, collaborating, and instructing others toward a shared goal.	Interpersonal, Working with others, Normative/cultural [12,16,34,41,45,46,48]
Communicating	Using written, verbal, or visual forms of communication to convey information.	Interpersonal [12,16,34,43,45,47,48]
Decision Making	Using critical thinking, available information, and negotiation to make timely and effective decisions.	Strategic thinking [12,16,34,41,48]
Professionalism	Respecting other people and effectively working in difficult situations.	Interpersonal [12,16,34,43,45,47]
Ethics	Identifying and understanding ethical contexts and implications of personal, professional, and societal differences.	Interpersonal, Working with others, Normative/cultural [12,16,34,41,45,47,48]
Diversity	Appreciating the positive effects of diversity and cultural differences.	Normative and cultural [12,34,43,45,47,48]
Evaluating	Evaluating different forms of information to guide decision making.	Strategic thinking [12,34,41]
Inter/Transdisciplinary	Acquiring inter/transdisciplinary knowledge and identifying ways to integrate across disciplines.	Interdisciplinarity [12,34,45,47]
Historical Antecedents	Understanding historical antecedents of current and future situations.	Systems thinking [12,34,48]

). We examined nine specializations because one of the eight has two different sub-specializations with different requirements, each is coded A–I.

The ten identified competencies varied in their distribution within and across specializations. Counts of sustainability leadership competencies targeted ranged from 0 to 8 for individual courses (Figure 2). Required courses mentioned five and six competencies, the highest median count of competencies across all course requirement types and specializations (median chosen for boxplot purposes). Statistics courses contained the fewest (median = 0.5 competencies). Median counts of sustainability leadership competencies varied across specializations’ core courses, ranging from 1 to 6. Core classes in some specializations provide more exposure to leadership competencies than others.

The number of leadership competencies within courses aligned with patterns of course content. Courses high in leadership competencies targeted focus on social behavior and adaptation, sustainable development and implementation, and systems analyses, as well as design. All of these courses are highly interdisciplinary. Courses low in leadership competencies targeted focus on particular types of analyses or software used in a particular discipline (e.g., natural resource spatial analysis) as well as traditional discipline-specific topics (e.g., plant systematics).

Because specializations vary in the number of core courses offered, we calculated the percentage of courses within specializations or course requirement types mentioning each competency (Figure 3). Specializations varied in the rates at which competencies were addressed in their courses (mean range: 22–54%). Across course requirement types, SEAS foundation courses were the most likely to mention a leadership competency (mean = 53%), followed by the SEAS methods courses: IAMS (mean = 30%), Analytics (mean = 24%), and Statistics (mean = 5%; Figure 3).

The Evaluating competency was the most focused on across specializations (mean = 70%), while Communicating was largely absent (mean = 7%; Figure 4) and suggests that regardless of specialization, some competencies are much less prevalent than others.

5.2. Cognitive Processing of Courses with Leadership Competencies

To better understand how sustainability leadership competencies related to cognitive processing expectations (i.e., an indicator for the ability to deploy leadership skills), we compared the count of leadership competencies to the course’s Bloom’s Taxonomy score. On average, each course had four leadership competencies and a Bloom’s score of 2.23, placing it between Understand and Apply. The Pearson correlation coefficient revealed little relationship between the count of leadership competencies and the level of Bloom’s Taxonomy targeted by a course (r = 0.1; Figure 5).

Rarely did a course target Bloom’s Taxonomy levels higher than Analyze. There was also no statistically significant relationship (p < 0.05) between the type and number of sustainability leadership competencies and Bloom’s Taxonomy levels. This suggests there are similar cognitive processing expectations regardless of the type of sustainability leadership competency (Figure 6).

6. Limitations

We identified which sustainability leadership competencies are targeted across one Master’s level interdisciplinary sustainability curriculum. As such, our results are not generalizable to other sustainability education programs. Additionally, some SEAS specializations and course requirement types provide students the option of completing courses offered by other UM units that we did not include, limiting us from capturing students’ full formal educational experiences. The majority of students are expected to complete a group capstone project or an independent thesis, the content of which was not evaluated for this study. Further, while there is utility in focusing on course descriptions, these summaries are limited in several ways. First, faculty may not update them on the SEAS website each semester to reflect the most recent iteration of the course. Secondly, they only provide a broad overview of the course. Although we discovered high consistency between the descriptions and syllabi for a select number of courses, we do not know how congruent they are with enactment. Variation in the instructor’s (inter)disciplinary background, experience with fostering different leadership competencies, and placement of the course in the curriculum are likely to be among the many factors ultimately affecting students’ mastery of leadership competencies. Future research ought to couple similar content analyses with complementary assessments such as classroom observation (e.g., [50]) as well as faculty and student surveys (e.g., [66]) to triangulate the extent to which sustainability leadership is being enacted across sustainability curricula.

7. Discussion

We analyzed text from descriptions of courses from an interdisciplinary graduate sustainability curriculum to identify the presence of sustainability leadership competencies as well as their distribution across specializations and types of courses. The type and frequency of sustainability leadership competencies varied across specializations and course types suggesting that not all SEAS Master’s students graduate with similar opportunities to master these competencies. No significant relationships were identified between sustainability leadership competencies and cognitive processing expectations, most likely because the latter did vary across the curriculum.

7.1. Leadership Competencies Vary by Specialization and Course Type

We identified ten key leadership competencies across SEAS’ course descriptions (Table 2). The competencies of evaluating, inter/transdisciplinarity, and ethics were identified in the highest percentage of course descriptions, suggesting that students are likely to be exposed to these competencies regardless of specialization (Figure 4). In contrast, the communicating competency was largely missing from the majority of courses.

Many of the sustainability leadership competencies targeted by courses in SEAS’ curriculum were consistent with those identified in existing sustainability competency frameworks such as managing [43], decision making [16], and ethics [41] (Table 2). However, we did not find evidence of others, such as resilience under pressure or shared leadership [42] as also included in this body of scholarship [48].

The frequency with which sustainability leadership competencies were mentioned appeared aligned with the (inter)disciplinary nature of the course. Courses that were interdisciplinary or focused on societal dilemmas tended to target more sustainability leadership competencies. In contrast, those focusing on a single discipline, typically the natural sciences, or particular methods mentioned fewer sustainability leadership competencies. This may be because some topics (e.g., social behavior and adaptation) may lend themselves to a greater focus on sustainability leadership competencies than others [67]. In our opinion, specializations less likely to have a sufficient number of courses also need to ensure their students gain sustainability leadership competencies because change agents are needed across all professions [4]. We suggest that infusing leadership competencies into as many courses as possible to prepare students to address complex global issues [68] like climate change, and when that is not possible encouraging students to complete courses focused on leadership development.

We also found a wide variety in the mention and frequency of sustainability leadership competencies across specializations. On the ends of the spectrum, two specializations differed greatly in their representation (Figure 3) and median count of competencies targeted by their core courses (F = 1 and H = 6; Figure 2). This again suggests that students enrolled in different specializations graduate with considerably varying exposure to learning about leadership. The large discrepancy between Specialization F and H may be due to the relatively small number of core courses available for students to choose from in these particular specializations. In the case of H, the few core courses offered addressed many leadership competencies, while in F, the small set of core courses mentioned few leadership competencies. The remaining specializations had many more core courses, and each also had courses that nearly spanned this range (Figure 2). We recommend revamping core courses low in leadership competencies by reconfiguring course topics or activities to better instill leadership opportunities. Offering a course focused on sustainability leadership may be ideal or at minimum creating workshops across specializations to learn about interdisciplinary team-science, community engagement, and communication in a low-risk environment [4].

The presence of leadership competencies also varied by course requirement type. In fact, we found a larger discrepancy of leadership competencies between course types than specializations. This may be due to the nature of course content (e.g., statistics and analytics) when compared to specializations. Notably SEAS’ two foundation courses that the majority of Master’s students are required to complete were both high in the number of total competencies (Figure 2) and targeted many competency types (Figure 3).

One way to efficiently expose all students to the same set of leadership competencies would be to expand the presence of the competencies within the two SEAS foundation courses that all Master’s students are required to take. Building off this, we also suggest a larger curricular shift in that interdisciplinary sustainability programs infuse leadership across all courses. Seminal higher education studies have found that the amount of time that students devote to learning activities influences their acquisition of new knowledge and skills [69,70]. Repeated exposure and reiteration of a topic in different course types and learning contexts are likely essential for deep learning of leadership skills [68,69,70].

Rather than an entire competency framework (e.g., [41]) or one specific competency (e.g., [43]) or sub-competency (e.g., [34]) focused on leadership (as seen in Figure 1), we put forward a fifth style of framework in that leadership be an element present across all sub-competencies (Figure 7). With increased exposure to learning about leadership, students are more likely to acquire necessary leadership skills. Further, in our suggested framing, we posit that leadership is connected to the existing sustainability competencies (such as sustainable development theory [43] and systems-thinking [34]), and specializations, such that students learn about leadership in ways that educate them about how to apply these skills in the context of these topics. In sum, as seen in Figure 7, to effectively prepare sustainability change agents, we argue that leadership must be integrated across all competencies. Because leadership looks different in different disciplines, future research should investigate sustainability leadership education needs with greater discipline specificity across the interdisciplinary field. No work to date considers sustainability competencies in high enough resolution to accommodate this type of analysis.

7.2. Cognitive Processing Not Associated with Sustainability Leadership

We used Bloom’s Taxonomy to understand how leadership development is being deployed within courses. While leadership competencies varied by type and amount, how they are taught is likely to result in different learning outcomes as well. Thus, it is important that we not only have breadth in the sustainability leadership competencies targeted but also depth in their application. Overall, courses scored relatively low in the level of cognitive processing as per Bloom’s Taxonomy, with an average score between Understand and Apply. This low score may be an artifact of our data relying solely on the text of course descriptions. These course descriptions may not be written to capture the variation in cognitive processing expected, since they focus primarily on sharing course content. There was no statistically significant correlation between Bloom’s Taxonomy scores and the number of leadership competencies within courses (r = 0.1), likely due to the little variation across Bloom’s Taxonomy scores (Figure 6). If significant variation in teaching and learning processes are not making their way into the course description, additional data collection methods such as classroom observations may be needed to capture expectations for cognitive processing levels [49].

8. Implications

Our results have several implications for improving sustainability education to foster effective change agents at SEAS and throughout other sustainability programs and schools (inter)nationally. Due to the variation in the type and amount of leadership competencies across specializations, a key leverage point to infuse leadership competencies into the curriculum lies within the SEAS foundation courses. However, this is ultimately a superficial intervention, as change agent development is central to contemporary sustainability education, and leadership training in the context of a student’s future field is likely to be particularly important for learning to apply these skills. Therefore, in the long-term, all courses should include teaching on leadership content. To do so, instructors should, at minimum, weave leadership skills throughout current climate change exercises. For example, in an exercise where students are hypothesizing ways climate projections will impact agricultural yields, they could subsequently be asked to brainstorm how they would effectively communicate their findings with local policymakers or how incorporating other disciplines (e.g., social sciences) could bolster their recommendations.

Additionally, specializations would benefit from a comprehensive review of leadership education in the context of their discipline and professional context. This would include reviewing the leadership competencies they offer, ensuring those competencies are skills most needed by professionals in their specific field, and working to provide a minimum amount of leadership exposure in all courses. The level of cognitive processing surrounding these competencies must also be reviewed. We found rather low amounts of cognitive processing at the course level using course descriptions as indicators. This may suggest that opportunities exist to elevate the level at which students engage with these competencies and ultimately their effectiveness in using these skills. It may also suggest that course descriptions, which may be a promising rapid evaluation tool for course content, are not well suited for the evaluation of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This merits further investigation. Lastly, for sustainability faculty to effectively teach leadership in their existing courses, school administrators need to provide support via training, professional development, and pedagogical resources. Administrators will also need to signal to faculty that leadership is a priority by considering student leadership development in reward and promotion decisions.

9. Conclusions

Sustainability curricula in higher education must not only address a wide range of disciplinary topics and facilitate students’ integration of these topics in inter-and transdisciplinary ways but also prepare students to become effective change agents. Due to the breadth of sustainability topics, infusing competencies specific to leadership, specifically climate change leadership, adds additional challenges for faculty. We offer a mapping method for relatively quickly assessing the extent to which sustainability leadership competencies may be targeted across curricula, using course descriptions likely to be readily available. We found leverage points to foster leadership competencies across an existing curriculum but recommend they be targeted across all courses to ensure all students are adequately and consistently exposed (Figure 7). We suggest future sustainability leadership research ideally apply our rapid curriculum mapping technique with other assessment approaches, to identify opportunities for where and how leadership competencies can be developed through sustainability curricula. To prepare the next generation of sustainability leaders, a coordinated effort is needed by all higher education institutions to ensure all students are exposed to and will master sustainability leadership competencies in ways that will ensure they become effective change agents.