Carbon footprint and management accounting for a sustainable world: An example of interdisciplinary collaboration

When Matthäus Tekathen, associate professor and Chair of Concordia’s Department of Accountancy heard about the Sustainability Co-Design Project, he was already thinking about ways to revamp the curriculum of the COMM 305: Managerial Accounting course. At the time, the John Molson School of Business had tasked different faculty members with the redesign of core BComm undergraduate courses, and Tekathen was leading the process for the COMM 305 course.

Before joining the project, he was already interested in integrating a sustainability lens into decision making in the course, as this is a core competency that students in business disciplines should acquire upon graduation. When he learned about the Sustainability Co-Design Project, it resonated deeply with him. “It was perfect timing,” says Tekathen. 

Managerial accounting, Tekathen explains, is about decision making, and businesses need to think about their impact on people and on the planet. So, when he started working with student partners Nour Khorassani, Kian Rahimidehban and Miumiu Wang, their immediate goal was to equip students, who will be future managers and business leaders, with a sustainability mindset. They wanted students to leave the course being able to apply a sustainability lens to their business decision-making processes.

Thanks to their hard work and collaboration, the COMM 305 course, which is taken by more than 1,500 students per year, now features a unit that allows students to explain the role of managerial accounting in corporate carbon management and apply this knowledge through hands-on decision-making case studies. 

Fostering change through interdisciplinary collaboration

One fascinating fact about this Co-Design Project is that its team members had diverse backgrounds. Tekathen, associate professor and Chair in the Department of Accountancy, was joined by a doctoral candidate in Engineering, Rahimidehban, and two accounting undergraduate students, Khorassani and Wang. Tekathen, who had never worked across Concordia’s faculties before the project, affirms it was the diversity of backgrounds that made the redesign so impactful. 

Khorassani and Wang had taken the class before joining the team, so their experiences and insights were extremely valuable when it came to making course design decisions. Additionally, Rahimidehban’s background in engineering allowed the team to approach the physical measurement of carbon emissions with ease. Without Rahimidehban’s expertise, the team would have struggled to access and understand this process. 

Finally, there was Tekathen’s experience teaching the course and his academic background. Together, the team was stronger. “Everybody brought in the expertise, and together we actually moved on faster, […] everybody brought in their resources and their knowledge, and then introduced concepts to the other [members] so that we could talk and have a common understanding,” explains Tekathen.

Tekathen also mentions that without the help and support of the staff from the Office of the Vice-Provost, Innovation in Teaching and Learning (VPITL), and of the faculty mentor, associate professor Luo He, the team could have not achieved the same results. The mentor provided the team with an overview of sustainability accounting. As well, the curriculum developer from the VPITL helped the team with the definition of the learning outcomes and facilitated some resources. 

Benefits and challenges of an ambitious project

Like many projects, this one faced several challenges, but that only worked to make the redesign stronger. The first challenge the team encountered involved the scope of the project. “We had many ideas of what we wanted to put in this learning module, and we prepared a lot of slides and resources, but then we had to keep in mind that it was only one unit,” explains Tekathen. 

From the beginning, the team knew that they wanted to design a complete unit with a clear structure to ensure it achieved the proposed learning outcomes within the course. Through open communication and multiple discussions, the team managed to find the right focus. 

The team faced a second challenge: ensuring the refined content was deliverable within the scheduled time without overwhelming students. For the team, it was important to put students at the center of the redesign, understand their backgrounds, and strike the right balance between learner needs and content needs. To address this issue, they reviewed the slide deck multiple times to provide feedback to each other, refining the slides and presentation material. 

The horizontal collaboration fostered by the student-as-partner model adopted for this project yielded amazing results. Tekathen says that he is so pleased with the outcome that he is considering incorporating this model in some of his future projects. He explains that before the project, his research began at the point at which carbon emissions were already measured. With the help of the student partners, not only was he able to redesign the unit, but he also learned about what goes into the physical process of measuring emissions. 

While this was a major highlight for Tekathen, this new understanding he acquired, that is now featured in the course, is extremely valuable for students taking it. “The redesigned unit brings a high-level conversation that is already happening, into practical steps. It is not just a cognitive process. Students get to do, and by doing, they get to internalize this awareness and knowledge about sustainability in a different way,” explains Tekathen. This is because in the unit students are taught how existing tools and frameworks in accounting can be adapted and used to promote sustainable practices.

Students in the COMM 305 course learn how to quantify carbon footprint and assign a monetary value to it. This is quite innovative, as sustainability has been so far taught and approached conceptually within the field of managerial accounting. The redesigned course takes an integrated and applied approach. As a result, students acquire a sustainability mindset and are better prepared for future roles as managers or employees of organizations. “They are better prepared for today’s jobs,” notes Tekathen. In fact, he told us that one student who took the redesigned course was able to obtain an internship in sustainability reporting because she showcased that she was familiar with carbon accounting.

Key takeaways  

The COMM 305 course is a multi-section course that has fifteen sections per year. Since the redesign happened, nine different instructors have taught the course. Tekathen is proud to say that the course has received positive feedback from students and instructors teaching the course. Instructors have liked this module a lot and find it to be one of the most pertinent sections of the entire course. “This is a section in which students engage more than usual” he adds.

When asked if he would recommend other instructors to weave in sustainability topics into their course Tekathen responds with an enthusiastic “just do it.” He believes that even a small step is better than nothing. 

“There are commonly two approaches: either you have a specialized course, or you have a general course where sustainability is integrated as part of another topic. While it is great to have specialized courses, we might be having even greater impact if we are also incorporating it into existing courses and showing, concretely, how sustainability is part of everything. That is where we can make a difference.”

To learn more about this Sustainability Co-Design Project, check out this summary. 

Written by Natalia Espinel Quintero