Reimagining Arts Education for Sustainability: Evidence from a Core BA Unit

This article presents a practice-based case study of embedding sustainability within a Bachelor of Arts course through a hybrid ‘One-to-many/Many-to-one’ pedagogy. Sustainability was positioned both as a cross-cutting theme within majors and as a shared problem space for interdisciplinary dialogue. Drawing on a compulsory sustainability unit at a regional Australian university, we analysed student forums and reflective essays to examine two dimensions: how majors aligned their disciplinary practices with selected SDGs and how sustainability competencies emerged through reflective and experiential pedagogies. Distinctive disciplinary strengths were evident: some majors emphasized systems and anticipatory reasoning, others normative critique and cultural analysis, and still others strategic, creative or collaborative practices. Collectively, these complementary profiles enriched sustainability literacy. The study contributes by showing how arts courses advance sustainability education, by operationalizing competency-based proximity coding to map disciplinary strengths and by aligning SDG engagement with competency development as a transferable scaffold for curriculum design.