Sustainability—An Issue for Both Student Learning
and Campus Planning?
The 2010 edition of the College Sustainability Report Card was released last week and provides additional evidence that colleges and universities are taking seriously the challenges of community, environment, social responsibility, and interdependence.
While it is worthwhile to recognize the schools that best match their rhetorical commitment to sustainability with campus practice, the sustainability categories that make up the grade remain incomplete. Institutions are graded in the following areas: administration; climate change and energy; food and recycling; green building; student involvement; transportation; endowment transparency; investment priorities; and shareholder engagement. What they are not yet judged on is the very heart of the higher education enterprise—teaching and learning.
We learned from a 2009 survey of AAC&U members that, of those institutions that have a set of common learning goals for all students, twenty-four percent report that their goals address sustainability. At AAC&U’s Shared Futures Global Learning Forum last March, participants shared strategies for translating such goals into curricular practice. Participants noted the difficulty of bridging the gap between campus efforts to make the university a more sustainable endeavor and the task of educating students for an interconnected world. While they agreed that the “greening” of the university (as a business) is an important endeavor, they argued that its impact is limited if it isn’t accompanied by the creation of curricula that engage students with questions of sustainability and interconnection.
Here are a few strategies that came out of that Global Learning Forum and are posted on the Shared Futures social network:
1. Ask the question: What are we trying to sustain? Look at the economic, cultural, and community implications of sustainability and acknowledge that the array of skills needed for this task is too large for a single approach. Only an interconnected solution exists to a problem that is itself so thoroughly interconnected.
2. Choose a gateway by which to enter sustainability: environment, people, or economics. Every field should be able to have a serious conversation about sustainability, and any topic has an element of interconnectedness that can be explored.
3. Use place-based learning to drive the connections home. This can take the form of experiential learning in the community, or it can mean redefining the scope of the “community” itself to varying degrees of locality: the classroom or building itself can be defined as the system to be studied.
Such efforts to translate sustainability into the curriculum often incorporate other outcome areas central to liberal education and familiar from AAC&U’s LEAP initiative and the Essential Learning Outcomes it addresses. Education for sustainability requires that students gain “knowledge focused by engagement with big questions; skills practiced extensively. . . in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance; personal and social responsibility anchored through active involvement with diverse communities and real-world challenges; and integrative learning demonstrated through the application of knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to new settings and complex problems.”
Many institutions find sustainability a useful common ground for developing interdisciplinary approaches to general education. I recently learned that Furman College has introduced a new requirement that all students take at least one course addressing “humans and the natural environment.” Curriculum development for such courses is coordinated by Furman’s new David E. Shi Center for Sustainability. Is your campus doing something similar? Let us know and AAC&U will eagerly spread the word. And I will look forward to a time when commitment to sustainability is judged by student learning as well as by the current criteria.
