A Ready Made Blueprint for Teaching a Full Semester Sustainability Reporting Course

Demand for sustainability reporting skills is rising in accounting classrooms, and instructors need a practical way to respond. A paper by Jeffrey Hales of The University of Texas at Austin and Amanda T. Lester, Assistant Professor of Accounting at the McCoy College of Business at Texas State University, offers a working template. Lester publishes as Mandy T. Lester. The paper appears in Issues in Accounting Education, the American Accounting Association’s journal for teaching and curriculum.

This is a teaching resource, not an empirical research study. It describes how to design and run a course rather than testing a hypothesis.

What the paper covers

The paper lays out a three-credit, full-semester course on sustainability reporting for accounting students. It addresses three questions an instructor would face. Why offer the course at all? How should it be structured? And what practical obstacles arise in getting it approved, staffed, and taught?

On motivation, the authors point to pressure from three directions: accounting educators, practitioners, and students. Each group has been asking for more sustainability content in the accounting curriculum. Sustainability reporting is the disclosure of a company’s environmental, social, and governance performance. It increasingly follows formal standards and, in some jurisdictions, regulatory mandates. Accountants are being asked to prepare, assure, and interpret this information.

On design, the paper details the course content and materials. On practical concerns, it discusses the issues faculty should expect when building a course from scratch.

A flexible design

The authors built the course as a stand-alone accounting elective. They recognize that many programs cannot add a new course quickly. Curriculum approval takes time, and departments may lack faculty capacity. For that reason, the materials are designed to be broken apart. Individual pieces can be inserted into existing accounting courses, and into non-accounting business courses, when a full course is not feasible.

What it means for accounting programs and employers

For department chairs and curriculum committees, the paper lowers the cost of a first step. Rather than designing from zero, faculty can adapt a course that has already been built and taught. The piecemeal option lets programs start small and expand as demand and resources allow.

For employers, the paper signals that universities are responding to the skills gap in sustainability reporting and assurance. Firms recruiting accounting graduates may see more candidates with formal exposure to sustainability standards.

For students, it makes the case that sustainability reporting is now part of the accountant’s toolkit, not a separate discipline.

This summary is based on the paper’s abstract. The full article reports the course design, materials, and implementation details.

What it means for managers

• Programs do not need to start from zero. The paper supplies a tested course design that faculty can adapt rather than build from scratch.
• A full course is not the only option. The materials are modular and can be dropped into existing accounting and non-accounting courses.
• Demand is coming from three directions at once: educators, practitioners, and students. Programs that wait risk falling behind employer expectations.

Hales, J., & Lester, M. T. (2026). Designing and implementing a sustainability reporting course. Issues in Accounting Education, 41(3), 171-195. 10.2308/issues-2024-091