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- Teaching Sustainability
- Sustainability as a Course Outcome
Teaching Sustainability
Earn a Sustainability Course Attribute
Earn a Sustainability Course Attribute: "Sustainability course attributes are applied to courses that integrate fundamental concepts of sustainability and connect to UN Sustainable Development Goals. Courses from across campus have Sustainability attributes.
Why get a course attribute?
- Help students navigate to courses with sustainability content relevant to their interests;
- Recruit students to your major;
- Have your undergraduate-level course be counted towards the Undergraduate Certificate in Sustainability;
- Have your graduate-level course be counted towards the Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Sustainability;
- Have your undergraduate courses eligible for elective status for undergraduate Environmental & Sustainability Studies majors;
- Help the university become recognized for its depth and breadth of curriculum."
Quick Tips for Integrating Sustainability in a Course
- When teaching a core course concept or skill, use sustainability-related examples.
- Ask students to apply your disciplinary content by reflecting on questions like:
- What is the public purpose of my discipline and how do the knowledge and skills I've gained impact real people in real communities?
- How can we use what we are learning to make the world a better place?
- How can my discipline inform solutions to poverty, injustice, and limits to growth globally and locally?
- How can we create processes, policies, and/or products without side effects that hurt individuals and communities, e.g., pollution?
- Engage with real world problem solving projects, capstones, or community engaged learning experiences so students can work with communities towards sustainability.
- Add sustainability-related learning outcomes into your course objectives.
- Select any of the learning activities here.
- Join the Sustainability Faculty Learning Community or Sustainability Teaching Scholars workshop.
Consider where your discipline fits:
Sample Learning Outcomes
- Students will be able to explain how sustainability relates to their lives and their values, and how their actions impact issues of sustainability.
- Students will be able to explain corporate social responsibility.
- Students will map the impacts of new or existing technologies.
- Students will be able to explain how systems – ecosystems, individual humans in society – are interrelated.
- Students will be able to identify externalities in economic systems.