Sustainable Futures in UK Higher Education Through Multi-disciplinary Innovation and Advanced Practice: A Northumbria University Case Study

The following chapter intends to critically reflect on multi-disciplinary collaboration and co-creation practices as educational design strategies for near-term impact within higher education, involving external organisations. As part of transformative learning applied to the area of sustainability, three distinct case studies from Northumbria University are presented to illustrate how collaborative projects with external partners around sustainable challenges are tackled by teams of university students supervised by experienced academics. This practice represents not only a testing and professionally rewarding learning and delivery experience for students and academics respectively, but also an effective and leading-edge educational delivery model to reflect on. Its associated pedagogic benefits and challenges will be discussed in order to provide a strategic overview of one of Northumbria University’s strands of ‘future-ready’ approaches to Higher Education which strongly supports students’ proactive attitude towards both innovation and an understanding of how to respond to ‘real-world’ sustainability-related challenges.