Guest Series: Teaching sustainability reporting & international relations using WikiRate
WikiRate offers academic partnerships like the one described in this blog for academics interested in teaching students how to collect and analyze companies’ environmental, social, and governance disclosures in the 21st Century — interested in finding out more?
Get details on hands-on research projects for students on WikiRate.
In April 2022, International Relations students at the University of Gloucestershire began a project with WikiRate to assess a selection of global companies’ contributions to achieving the SDGs.
Using the WikiRate platform, students aggregated data and analyzed sustainability practices of companies such as Ford Motor Company, Hermes International, AT&T Inc., TOD’S, Woolworths Holdings Limited, Hitachi Ltd., Ericsson, and Pfizer.
The WikiRate team spoke with professor Rachel Bennett to learn more about the class’ project and their experience using WikiRate.
- Which students took part in the project, and how did they participate?
The students involved in this research project were first-year undergraduates in the International Relations programme at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK. We worked on the project in an introductory research methods module where the students learned the basics of research design and data analysis and presentation.
The project used these new research skills to collect and analyze data on how multinational corporations perform on labour, gender, and environmental standards linked to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Each student was assigned a corporation and tasked with identifying data values for 18 metrics on their companies’ performance and entering them into the WikiRate platform. Students also presented their key findings and wrote a research report on their projects.
2. Why did you search for a tool like WikiRate?
We were looking for a way for students to use their new research skills on a live project linked to the real world of International Relations. The students learn about the role of transnational corporations in the international political system on a theoretical level in other parts of the course.
This project was a chance for the students to use their research skills to generate new evidence and analyze how companies perform against social and environmental goals in real time.
3. What was your overall experience using WikiRate?
The experience of working with WikiRate was fantastic. In the first session, we started with a video call with Lucía Ixtacuy from the WikiRate team, who gave some context to the organisation’s goals and introduced students to the platform they would use for the research.
The students quickly picked up the platform thanks to the excellent guidance sheets provided by WikiRate. They were soon comparing how well or not their assigned companies were doing against different targets.
At the end of the project, the students delivered short presentations on their corporations’ overall performance based on the metrics they had identified for the WikiRate platform. Lucía also joined us for the session — so it was an excellent opportunity for students to present to each other and to WikiRate. It was a real achievement for our students to successfully contribute to an international research project and present their findings.
4. What challenges have you come up against while teaching sustainability reporting and corporate responsibility?
A key challenge for teaching in this area, especially for a discipline like International Relations, is to think the issues through on a practical level. A major plus of the WikiRate project was that students were generating data on corporate responsibility metrics for their own use in an assignment and contributing to a bigger international initiative.
The students threw themselves into the project, conducting thorough background research on their assigned companies and identifying the metrics needed for the WikiRate platform. We had some great discussions about the current practice of companies and the sorts of practical policies and procedures that might encourage companies to perform better and report better on social and environmental goals.
