How to get students care about sustainability through the teaching of business ethics and corporate sustainability in management education? This scholarly investigation addresses this question by conceptualizing the needs for emotional learning in teaching business ethics and corporate sustainability. The main proposition is that caring for sustainability requires teachers to activate students’ intrinsic motivation as responsible global citizens. Such motivation requires emotional learning, which goes beyond cognitive learning on declarative and functional knowledge of concepts and models to analyze sustainability issues and the role of businesses in creating as well as addressing such issues. A selection of modules on business ethics and corporate sustainability taught at a management school based in the United Kingdom is used as an illustrative case to showcase how teachers position emotional learning in their teaching (and assessment) of business ethics and sustainability and to identify the challenges teachers face in facilitating emotional learning of young adults. The preliminary results combining text analysis and semi-structured interviews reveal that teachers are aware of emotional learning as an important learning outcome while facing institutional challenges on how to effectively incorporate emotional in their teaching practices.
