Shaping socially responsible leaders: Professor Etzion’s course recognized by Aspen Institute

The Aspen Institute Business & Society Program has announced the winners of the 2017 Ideas Worth Teaching Award, an annual prize that recognizes teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels that is redefining excellence in business education.

Among the 20 winning courses is Professor Dror Etzion’s Sustainability & Environmental Accounting class, which incorporates existing multidisciplinary knowledge in corporate sustainability accounting to respond to the growing need among organizations to develop and implement management systems for social responsibility.

Through a combination of lectures and experiential learning, students are encouraged to think critically about corporate cases that pertain to sustainability, and have an opportunity to analyze and interpret data, such as McGill University’s Greenhouse Gas emissions.

For the Fall 2017 semester, the class benefitted from the co-teaching of Rozhin Yousefvand-Mansouri, PhD Candidate at the Desautels Faculty of Management.

The Ideas Worth Teaching Award winners will be recognized at Working Towards Shared Prosperity: An Academic-Executive Dialogue in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Oct. 26-27, 2018.

For additional information, including full details on the awarded-winning courses for 2017, please visit: www.ideasworthteachingawards.com

The Aspen Institute Business and Society Program

The Aspen Institute Business and Society Program (Aspen BSP), founded in 1998, works with business executives and scholars to align business decisions and investments with the long-term health of society—and the planet. Through carefully designed networks, working groups and focused dialogue, the Program identifies and inspires thought leaders and “intrapreneurs” to challenge conventional ideas about capitalism and markets, to test new measures of business success and to connect classroom theory and business practice. The Business and Society Program is most known for the First Movers Fellowship, for dialogue on curbing short-termism in business and capital markets, and for fresh thinking about the Purpose of the corporation. For more information, visit www.aspenbsp.org.

The Aspen Institute

The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, DC. Its mission is to foster leadership based on enduring values and to provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues.  The Institute is based in Washington, DC; Aspen, Colorado; and on the Wye River on Maryland's Eastern Shore.  It also has offices in New York City and an international network of partners. For more information, visit www.aspeninstitute.org.