From Practice to Professional Growth: Embedding Sustainability in Faculty Development Through the CoDesignS Framework

Integrating sustainability principles into higher education curricula is a global imperative, yet it poses significant challenges for faculty development, particularly across diverse disciplinary and cultural contexts. This paper explores how the process of embedding sustainability into university courses acts as a catalyst for educator transformation, influencing faculty identity, pedagogical method, and professional agency. Drawing on a qualitative multiple case study conducted at two international universities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, this study analyzes teaching artefacts, course materials, and reflective journals from courses spanning information systems, business analytics, digital marketing, and media and communication. The CoDesignS Framework served as both a design and analytical scaffold to align teaching practices with key sustainability competencies and transformative pedagogies. Findings demonstrate that sustainability integration encourages not only deeper student engagement but also meaningful professional growth for educators, shifting their roles from content experts to co-designers of learning. This paper contributes a practitioner-led, contextually grounded model for embedding Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and argues that empowering faculty through flexible, reflective frameworks such as CoDesignS may be more effective than top-down compliance approaches in driving institutional change.