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Building a community of practice to facilitate integration of sustainability into higher education curriculum
Mueller, Jennifer Minster, Mark DeVasher, Rebecca
Mueller, Jennifer
Minster, Mark
DeVasher, Rebecca
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Editors
Date
2025
Educational Level
Curriculum Area
Geographical Setting
United States of America
Abstract
Directing education for sustainability towards a hopeful future requires coordinated, interdisciplinary approaches. By creating a decentralized, interdisciplinary teaching network at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2023-24, the three of us supported eighteen faculty participants as they designed sustainability modules for curricula across ten academic departments. This wide range of programs and academic disciplines at a STEM institution indicates a larger campus-wide commitment to sustainability and the potential for broad impact across the student body as materials from the sessions are implemented in 2024-25 and beyond in discipline-specific course content. Our sustainability-across-the-curriculum network started with foundational concepts of sustainability and sustainable design, a battery of pedagogical tools and techniques, and a menu of local-to-global opportunities for applying sustainability in and beyond our courses, from campus gardens to international travel courses. From our opening workshop to the end of the year, faculty developed course content collaboratively and reflectively. In a series of four working lunches, we shared ideas and practices to support each other through group activities to brainstorm relevant learning opportunities and align course outcomes with established sustainability frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the sustainability competencies model. At the end of the academic year, each participant incorporated sustainability learning strategies into a course of their choice through a variety of approaches, including one-day in-class activities plus follow-up assignments, multi-day course modules, course projects, and lab exercises. Participants shared their work with the campus community at a poster session accompanied by a panel discussion with representatives from other colleges and universities to share strategies, practices, and opportunities for integrating sustainability in and across the curriculum. As we worked with this community of practice, the three of us investigated ways in which a faculty network might work within a framework that allowed for measured growth in sustainable curricular opportunities for undergraduate students. We collected feedback from participants through surveys conducted at the beginning and end of the academic year. The results show that most participants were interested in learning about what other faculty were doing, continuing their own education overall, and understanding and pursuing sustainability education specifically. Although we faced challenges through this work, creating a supportive, big-tent environment for sharing helped to increase the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds around sustainability and to broaden students' opportunities across the undergraduate STEM curriculum.
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Keywords (free text)
workshops, community partnerships, lab exercises, engineering education, engineering for sustainable development, education for sustainabilty, sustainability in engineering