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Since 2006, the SGT Programme has consistently developed and implemented transformative teaching models to foster creativity, innovation, and critical thinking among students, mentors, and partners. Our ways of teaching and learning are largely derived from design thinking, a human-centred approach, and problem-based learning (PBL).  

SGT takes a systematic and progressive approach to sustainability education that is structured across the academic year. At SGT, sustainability education totals up to 17 ECTS through three courses: 

• WAT-E3020: State of the World and Development (2 ECTS)
• WAT-E2060: Sustainable Built Environment (5 ECTS)
• WAT-E2070: Sustainable Global Technologies Studio (10 ECTS) 

During these courses, students start with building a broad interdisciplinary understanding of global sustainability challenges, progressing to exploring practical skills and using participatory methods that support sense-making, dialogue, and teamwork across disciplines, and finally to applying their knowledge in real-world project work in collaboration with international partners. Rather than focusing on teaching sustainability as a concept, the SGT Programme empowers students to develop the tools, mindsets, and collaborative skills needed to critically engage with sustainability issues and see themselves as agents of change in relation to global challenges. 

Our programme is continuously developed in active collaboration with students and global partners to ensure it stays relevant to societal needs and in-line with Aalto University’s strategy. Student feedback, co-creation, and ethical engagement are central to how we teach, learn, and evolve. 

WAT-E3020 State of the World and Development 

Responsible teacher[LH2] : Julia Sundman, Doctoral Research, Water and Development Research Group (ENG) 

‘All Aalto students should take this course.’ 

This is a recurring piece of feedback we receive almost every year for this course that is organised as a 2-ECTS open lecture series available for master's and doctoral students from all six Aalto Schools. The course serves as the introduction to the SGT Programme and provides a holistic, interdisciplinary foundation for sustainability learning before students engage with the topic more deeply through the systematic and collaborative approaches in the subsequent SGT courses. While the ECTS credits are targeted at students, Aalto staff and other interested participants are welcome to join the sessions.

The aim of the course ‘State of the World and Development’ is to introduce students to the complexities and future pathways of global development. Each of the ten sessions features a high-level expert – either an academic, a practitioner or a policymaker – who shares a fresh and topical perspective on environmental, social, (geo)political, and economic issues to the participants. The themes have ranged from conflict zones, humanitarian urbanism, and spatial diplomacy to indigenous rights, media narratives, and the evolving role of international aid alongside changing priorities in development policy. The specific topics change each year to reflect current global trends and debates. 

The diversity of speakers – and of students – can stir both complementing and conflicting perspectives, which is also the point: students are encouraged to form their own perspectives and reflect on their own positionality in relation to these seemingly big sustainability questions – an essential practice for developing critical thinking, self-awareness, and agency that sustainability education aims to foster.

Weekly assignment: Creative reflections 

To support learning, students complete a weekly ‘Creative Reflection’ assignment in an open forum, where they manifest their learnings and engage in dialogues with other students through a medium of their choice. The assignment is instructed as follows: 

‘Make short reflections on the lectures of the week with a clear viewpoint, indicating your own thought development. It could be a review of a presented topic, an answer to a question presented during the lecture, or an insight you gained from discussions. 

Your reflection, your format! Drawings, comic strips, poems and alike are allowed. If you are writing, it is important that the texts are short, concise and sharp – not much longer than this instruction text! Reading and commenting each other's entries is highly encouraged!’ 

Submissions have included written texts, poems, visual artwork, games, comic strips, and even rap songs. This open-ended approach helps students to think of multiple ways to engage with course contents, and it also accommodates diverse learning styles.  Most importantly, it empowers students to make sense of global issues in ways that are personally meaningful and relevant to their own contexts.

WAT-E2060 Sustainable Built Environment 

Responsible teacher: Anni Juvakoski, Postdoctoral researcher,Water and Development Research Group (ENG)

Master’s course for anyone interested (pre-requisite course: State of the World and Development) 

Part of the Sustainable Global Technologies programme

Course Concept

The course aims to equip students with the knowledge necessary to create functional and sustainable built environments — whether in neighbourhoods, cities, or rural areas — and explores how these might differ globally. It focuses on technologies, infrastructures, and policies that promote environmentally, culturally, and economically sustainable environments worldwide. Each weekly theme is presented by experts, covering topics such as water, waste and sanitation, energy, architecture and city planning, futures thinking and social resilience, humanitarian response, as well as infrastructure and emergency supply (Figure 1). 

Course Workflow

Students are organised into multidisciplinary teams, working collaboratively throughout the course. This setup helps them learn how to operate in international teams and tackle challenges alongside professionals from various fields. Coursework focuses on intensive sessions with minimal homework. 

On Mondays, students attend an interactive lecture related to theme of the week. Before the lecture, teams complete a rapid-fire task in which they address a challenge from the previous week in 30 minutes. These mini-workshops include tasks such as: 

‘With your experience of watching the first episode of the TV series City of Men [students watch it at home], propose an architectural intervention project that could improve the lives of the favela inhabitants. Strive to empathise with the boys and their families.’ — Architecture mini-workshop task (2024) 

These mini-workshops are graded with the input of the expert lecturer of each theme. On Wednesdays, students participate in a workshop relevant to the theme. For example, in the humanitarian logistics workshop, students collaborate to design a plan for delivering aid to a flooded area with limited vehicles and resources.

As the week concludes, students complete a ‘take-home-message-of-the-week’ task where they quickly outline what they learned. This can focus on specific details or provide an overall reflection. The final course assignment is to create portfolio showcasing how course themes apply to a chosen case. This free-format task allows submissions such as reports, videos, podcasts, or other formats. The portfolio accounts for 50 percent of the final grade, mini-workshop 25 percent, and peer assessments make up the remaining 25 percent.

Intended Learning Outcomes 

We aim for the interactive course sessions to highlight the tools — such as frameworks and best practices — necessary for addressing each theme’s challenges and to provide practical skills for their application. Working in diverse teams also presents a valuable learning experience, as tasks often emulate real-life scenarios in which students must balance differing stakeholder incentives and make compromises to reach solutions. This is a crucial aspect of sustainability education.

For example, during the water week, students assume the roles of fishing communities, energy companies, and environmentalists, reconciling their interests concerning river protection. Guest lecturers present varied cases, such as the green transition of the Finnish energy system or electrification in a small rural village in Namibia. While lecturers may have differing opinions, it encourages students to think critically. The portfolio task enables students to compile their learning in a way that demonstrates the interaction of all course themes within the context of a real-world built environment.

Feedback 

Feedback from 2024 indicates that students generally appreciate the course's variety in themes, lecturers, and exercises. They also enjoy the freedom offered by the portfolio task. While some students find the emphasis on group work and workshops intense, most value these components. One student summarised their assessment of the course as follows:

‘I liked the variety of topics related to social justice and sustainability, especially in areas with significant challenges. The topics felt highly meaningful and important, making the course motivating.’ — Anonymous student, course feedback (2024)

WAT-E2070 Sustainable Global Technologies (SGT), Studio 

Responsible teacher: Matleena Muhonen, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture (ARTS) & SGT Programme coordinator (ENG)

The SGT Studio is the most versatile and intensive course within the SGT Programme. It serves as a follow-up to two foundational courses: State of the World and Development and Sustainable Built Environment.

In the SGT Studio, students enhance their professional skills by collaborating with peers and experts from diverse backgrounds, disciplines, and cultures on real-world sustainability challenges. These challenges are framed as study cases developed in cooperation with project partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including local universities, civil society organisations, communities, and/or industries.

The course consists of expert lectures, project design workshops, review and peer-working sessions, and a two-week fieldwork. Key learning outcomes include the ability to work in an interdisciplinary and intercultural setup within a complex multi-stakeholder environment, to identify, critically analyse, and logically approach the needs in the project context, and to put different phases of international project work into practice.

The learning process begins with structured project definition and planning, background research, and intensive preparation for a two-week field study period. After the field study, teams reflect on their findings and insights to develop solutions, products, or proposals. Throughout the course, several reflection tools are utilised — ranging from individual creative reflections to quick shared tools like mood meters — as well as several review sessions that facilitate open discussion, knowledge exchange, and peer support. To ensure a smooth learning experience, each team is guided by a designated mentor or mentors typically from research groups at Aalto.

A critical aspect of fieldwork preparation is ensuring that students adopt the appropriate mindset and attitude before visiting case locations and engaging with partners. This includes discussing expectations, cultural norms and sensitivities related to the student team, case locations and partners. To support this, we use several tools during the preparation phase, including:

Hopes & Fears (+ Needs) 

This exercise reveals various aspects and expectations to the entire team and can be repeated multiple times throughout the process, including with peers, partners, and stakeholders. The tool also aids in conducting retrospective reflections at the end of the learning process. 

We often begin by asking each participant, including mentors, to individually list their 'hopes' on sticky notes, one item per note. Following this, they list their 'fears'. These hopes and fears can relate to various elements, such as the course, the process, fieldwork, teamwork, mentoring, learning, and so on.

We start by addressing fears, followed by hopes. As these elements emerge, we often discuss them as a group. The 'needs' aspect manifests during the exploration of each team member's individual needs for effective teamwork and the practical needs for field travel.

*The method is adopted from: IDEO (Firm). (2015). The field guide to human-centred design: design kit (1st edition). IDEO.

Ethics sensitising 

Alongside several global case studies, we have developed a sensitising exercise to support students' and mentors' cultural awareness and sensitivity, promoting respectful and effective engagement and building empathy. To support discussion, we have collected various likely or potential scenarios that might typically occur during the study project. The student teams are requested to identify the potential problem and discuss possible solutions. 

Below are two examples of the sensitising cases that we use to help students understand unethical practices in lower-income settings and the perpetuation of colonial attitudes where local participants are treated as ‘o�ٳ�����’.

Ethics dumping 

‘On the weekend of fieldwork in Ivory Coast, Eero takes a break by exploring the Bangolo village where he stays. While walking around, he sees a group of children playing awalé, a traditional Ivorian game. Eero is asked to join, but he decides to watch them playing from the side. 

During the game, Eero takes a lot of pictures of the children. When the children finish the game, Eero asks them to take a photo with him. Eero posts the pictures on Instagram. He writes “Look how happy these children are despite the unfortunate living conditions. We have so much to learn from them.” He hopes his followers would be more aware of the people of Ivory Coast and provide assistance for his project.’

Parachute science 

‘Sofia visits five cocoa farms in Ivory Coast to understand why their cocoa is still not organic. She meets the farmers and has a one-hour conversation with each farmer within two days. On the weekend, while still in Ivory Coast, Sofia works hard to develop recommendations on how to make the cocoa farms more sustainable. 

After the field trip, she writes a policy brief about sustainable cocoa production in Ivory Coast and sends it to relevant stakeholders (e.g., the EU and Ivory Coast government) hoping for policy change.’ 

*These learning cases were created as teaching material by SGT mentor, Dr Daniel Chrisendo from Aalto ENG / Water and Development Research Group.

Through these exercises, along with effective mentoring, various other reflection tasks, and interaction facilitation, we aim to empower students to approach sustainability challenges with the appropriate attitude, awareness, and empathy, and to equip them with skills for intercultural communication and collaboration, encourage long-term change, and inspire creative solutions to address sustainability.