“Responsibility Seminar”: IÉSEG teaches its new 1st-year students about responsible communication
08/31/2018
Every year, IÉSEG organizes a seminar with a responsibility/corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related pedagogical challenge during the first week of the academic year for new students in the first year of the Grande Ecole Program. This seminar aims to increase students’ awareness about the impact of their actions on society and in the world in general. It also sensitizes them to issues relating to ethics, social responsibility, all the while teaching them to work collectively.
Around 800 students participated in the two-day responsible communication challenge on both campuses (Lille and Paris).
Divided into groups of 8 to 12, their mission was to propose a coherent set of actions in terms of responsible communication for a fictive company. In order to do this, each student had a particular role: writer, information collector, presenter, monitor/manager of the ethical dimension of the project, innovation manager, and general program administrator.
Together, they had to brainstorm about issues such as:
• Customer prevention and awareness campaigns concerning the use of products and services,
• The respectful use of clients’ data,
• Ecological awareness in communication tools.
Each group had the possibility of obtaining additional information through access to a decentralized headquarters, made up of professors and students of other years from the program, where they could ask questions if needed in order to go about their mission.
At the end of these two days, the teams turned in their recommendations and presented their results in front of a jury of professors. This jury chose the six winning teams on each campus, and awarded a special prize to two additional teams.
Testimonial from Sabine Choquet, a researcher who has jointly been in charge of this challenge:
“This year, we decided to work on a current issue that affects companies, as well as society as a whole. Responsible communication provides the public with complete, clear, trustworthy, pertinent and verifiable information. It takes into account its impact on the community and the environment. Similarly, it aims to minimize negative effects in terms of the environment, and to have positive economic and social benefits. Beyond the CSR aspect, this activity aims to teach students to work collectively, to be aware of the impact of their actions and their decisions (on their environment), to vary their sources of information and to be curious in order to enrich their responses.”