Green Gown Awards Australasia 2015 – ACTS Award of Excellence: Staff - Winner

Dr Colin Hocking

La Trobe University

Colin has collaboratively led the curriculum development processes at La Trobe to help embed sustainability across all undergraduate courses – an Australian first. To date, this has included working with academic staff in large scale subjects across disciplines such as business, arts, health, education, science and numerous other areas, to incorporate sustainability that is robustly expressed and assessed, in line with the University-wide definition of sustainability. Colin has used his position and experience to broaden discussion and exchange of ideas and resources to assist education for sustainability (EfS) practitioners, across Australia and beyond. This includes establishing the outward looking La Trobe website for documenting La Trobe’s processes, tools, examples and resources for sustainability education. It also led to the establishment of the first Australia-wide network of tertiary EfS practitioners, winning funds to help put this network on a solid footing, now transformed into the SUSTAINed Network. This now has over 100 active participants, discipline and interdisciplinary interest hubs, and has run three blended on-line and face to face national symposia over 18 months. Colin has presented his work at National and International conferences, and in 2014 won (as lead author) the best paper and presentation at the World Symposium on Sustainable Development in Higher Education.