Transdisciplinary education for smart sustainable development

The needs and demands of our global society, encompassed by the dominance of contemporary socio-economic and environmental systems, require significant reassessment and adjustment. Existing educational models need a new vision that embraces global citizenship as the umbrella for change. Higher education (HE) Institutions should examine how they can support and enable the development of proactive and dynamic teaching, learning, and research environments beyond the existing inclusive and sustainability debates. The ongoing discussions seem quite limited and restricted to climate change issues, the narrow association of inclusive education with special needs education, and the adequacy of teaching and learning environments that do not seem to be realistic as they try to accommodate learners’ diversity compounded by multiple and multifaceted problems and realities. In this chapter, we argue for the need to open the discussions to a broader domain that aims to create innovative, dynamic, and transformative learning environments that challenge the status quo of neoliberal and colonial paradigms and the commodification pressures dramatically affecting education and its continuous commercialisation. Current global challenges require HE Institutions that support change for real impact. We propose to take some time to think carefully about the value that transdisciplinary education can offer to help us navigate the challenges associated with sustainable development. Our discussions consider the importance of developing new ways of learning and teaching, which provides insights into the importance of teaching, learning, and research paradigms where the student, the teacher and the researcher interchange their roles. We argue on the need for new and innovative pedagogies that can emerge as a significant pillar within the transdisciplinary education framework that fosters inclusivity, integration, and awareness of our role as global actors that impact social, political, environmental, and economic intertwined systems. We explore the close connection among the teacher, the student and the researcher and how they can be articulated within the marketing discipline and smart learning environments. The role of marketing theory and practice and how it can contribute to a transformation process that will enable a potential paradigm shift that integrates different viewpoints is central to our critical discussion. In alignment with the book’s research core elements, a deep discussion examining mainstream education is needed as the world’s top business schools and top academic journals must reconsider how to integrate and incorporate views from the non-Western world across disciplines.