We’re Award Finalists for PIEoneer’s Progressive Education Delivery Category

IES Abroad's Designing the Sustainable City course has been shortlisted for the PIEoneer Awards in the Progressive Education Delivery category. 

IES Abroad piloted the Designing the Sustainable City course ES/SO360 in Spring 2022 in Barcelona, London, and Milan. Due to the success of the program, we have since expanded to seven additional Centers (10 total)—Nice, Cape Town, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Santiago, and Tokyo—in an effort to provide relevant, meaningful academic programming to our students, to be an active participant in bettering the world, and to align with our mission and our Global Good Commitment.   

Regardless of a student’s academic focus and career aspirations, sustainability plays, and will continue to play, an important role and we are dedicated to providing the education and training that our future leaders need and that employers seek.  

The Designing the Sustainable City course allows students the opportunity to:  

1. Engage in a multidisciplinary and multicultural learning community that addresses a global issue. 
2. Engage with award-winning faculty who are leaders and experts in their respective fields. 
3. Develop projects that directly impact the well-being of their local host communities and that challeng them to hone their skills in team building, negotiation, data collection and analysis, and presentation in an international setting. 
4. Experience substantive field visits and connections with local community, which offer real-life examples and valuable data. 
5. Apply their learning by working in small teams to design a project that can present solutions to the issues they have identified at the local level, taking into account the environmental, historical, and social characteristics of their host city.  

Both students and faculty provided outstanding feedback when asked about their experience with the course and are another testament to IES Abroad’s strides towards sustainability and progressive education. Two of the Spring 2022 Barcelona students even noted that the course had galvanized them to finalize plans to conduct research in areas related to social equality and sustainability.  

Take it from a faculty member who served as an integral part of the course: 

From our students: 

"[we learned about] collective teamwork, communication, and analysis skills of observing your settings, and the factors that go into ensuring that a city is sustainable."

"I feel like you hear ‘sustainability’ and [you think] ‘hydro flask’ or ‘recycling’ but it’s way more than that and it’s beyond materials, it’s about people who are involved, too."

Ranking as a finalist in PIEoneer Awards’ Progressive Education Delivery category is proof of our continued efforts to grow the Designing the Sustainable City course and drive our sustainability efforts forward. IES Abroad aims to provide incredible service to students and schools, and we are proud to be recognized for our commitment to providing our students unmatched global educational experiences and being an active participant in creating a more sustainable world.  

The PIEoneer Awards 2023 will be held on Friday, September 22nd at the Hilton Bankside in London, England, and there will also be a live broadcast of the show. We can’t wait to find out the results and congrats to the other finalists!  

Learn more about our award-winning work, and our Global Good Commitment.