Sustainability
SUSTAINABILITY ACCOUNTING AND REPORTING
Shirley Polejewski
Professor
University of St. Thomas
2115 Summit Ave MCH 316
Saint Paul, MN 55105 sapolejewski@stthomas.edu Phone 651-962-5112
Fax 651-962-5093
SUSTAINABILITY ACCOUNTING AND REPORTING
INTRODUCTION
Sustainability education or learning involves more than providing expert knowledge to inform students about sustainability issues. It is about encouraging transformative learning—the capacity to construct knowledge to challenge practice, to critique and debate sustainability issues. The basis objective of teaching “Sustainability” in the first year accounting course is to introduce basic concepts and motivation for sustaining management accounting and reporting.
Students would become acquainted with major frameworks and would be able to discuss relationships of sustainability to financial accounting and prepare students to carry out these concepts into management and cost accounting courses. By incorporating sustainability into the beginning financial accounting course helps students learn to think critically by giving them a range of questions to consider at the same time as the traditional problems and questions of the accounting curriculum. Several case studies could be incorporated into the financial accounting class that deal with activities, methods and systems to record, analyze and report environmental and economic uses that constitute the dimensions of sustainability.
Background
Sustainability accounting” has become a generic term! A review of the literature gives a blurred picture of what is covered by this term. It appears that few definitions of sustainability accounting exists evening papers with the term in their titles. It also seems that sustainability accounting has not been adequately conceptualized and at best a vague description can be found of what is expected from sustainability accounting. In many cases it appears that sustainability accounting is just used
Shirley Polejewski
Professor
University of St. Thomas
2115 Summit Ave MCH 316
Saint Paul, MN 55105 sapolejewski@stthomas.edu Phone 651-962-5112
Fax 651-962-5093
SUSTAINABILITY ACCOUNTING AND REPORTING
INTRODUCTION
Sustainability education or learning involves more than providing expert knowledge to inform students about sustainability issues. It is about encouraging transformative learning—the capacity to construct knowledge to challenge practice, to critique and debate sustainability issues. The basis objective of teaching “Sustainability” in the first year accounting course is to introduce basic concepts and motivation for sustaining management accounting and reporting.
Students would become acquainted with major frameworks and would be able to discuss relationships of sustainability to financial accounting and prepare students to carry out these concepts into management and cost accounting courses. By incorporating sustainability into the beginning financial accounting course helps students learn to think critically by giving them a range of questions to consider at the same time as the traditional problems and questions of the accounting curriculum. Several case studies could be incorporated into the financial accounting class that deal with activities, methods and systems to record, analyze and report environmental and economic uses that constitute the dimensions of sustainability.
Background
Sustainability accounting” has become a generic term! A review of the literature gives a blurred picture of what is covered by this term. It appears that few definitions of sustainability accounting exists evening papers with the term in their titles. It also seems that sustainability accounting has not been adequately conceptualized and at best a vague description can be found of what is expected from sustainability accounting. In many cases it appears that sustainability accounting is just used
References: Esty, Daniel C. and Winston, Andrew S. “Green to Gold” Yale University Press, New Haven & London copyright 2006. Uhl, Christopher, “Developing Ecological Consciousness”. Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. NY 2004 7