PEDAGOGY
Sustainability: Going Beyond Science Classes Faculty Across Vast Departments Are Infusing Sustainability into Curriculum by Lori Gilbert
Stanislaus State offers sustainability-focused courses from the role of nature in U.S. history to climatology. Agriculture majors may choose concentrations in sustainable agriculture and agricultural and environmental resource management. The lessons don’t end there though. Students are introduced to sustainability in more than 150 courses, some because professors across disciplines and departments participated in a sustainability Faculty Learning Community (FLC). Offered through the University’s Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (FCETL), the course has been held three times by program FCETL Director Shradha Tibrewal and Sustainability Coordinator Wendy Olmstead, with 31 faculty representing 19 disciplines attending. “When we, as a campus, launched our sustainability efforts, we looked for initiatives that would provide the greatest impact,” Olmstead said. “Our Council for Sustainable Futures agreed that the single most impactful initiative we could employ was to infuse sustainability into our curriculum. Using the University of Vermont’s highly successful teaching sustainability FLC as a model, Shradha and I designed the FLC to help faculty infuse sustainability into the curriculum of any academic discipline.” Participants have applied sustainability into musical expression
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