Place-Based Case Teaching in Economic Geography: Fostering Sustainability Competencies Through Hometown Industry Observation

Traditional economic geography teaching has failed to effectively help students identify the sustainable development intentions contained in industrial transformation. Sustainable Development Education (ESD) has become a key path to address this challenge, but there remains a lack of empirical exploration of how to effectively integrate ESD into economic geography courses. Therefore, this study embeds place-based teaching into the course and creates a ten-week intervention module called “Observation of Hometown Industries” at a comprehensive university in Hubei Province, China, requiring 105 second-year undergraduate geography majors to conduct field research on the sustainable transformation of local industries. Based on a mixed research design, the results indicated that the most pronounced gains occurred in students’ self-efficacy for sustainability (relative increase 20.0%), closely followed by sustainability-related knowledge and sense of place belonging (19.8%), and systems-thinking capacity (18.2%), with effect sizes ranging from 0.76 to 0.89, indicating moderate-to-strong educational relevance. Qualitative analysis further revealed that this place-based teaching approach helps students recognize the complex trade-off between economic growth, environmental conservation, and social equity in the sustainable transformation of industries. This study provides empirical evidence for cultivating key sustainable literacy in higher education and offers an operational teaching model for integrating ESD into economic geography courses.