Sustainability is becoming a key concept of the 21st century that cuts across discussions of the environment and agriculture, but also business, health care, education, politics and a plethora of other issues. Richard Law, director of general education at WSU, would like to ensure that discussions of sustainability also are part of the undergraduate curriculum.
In an e-mail sent to WSU’s Sustainability Workgroup in late February, Law urged faculty whose courses touch on the topic to consider including their courses in the general education curriculum, at the lower levels but especially at the tier-three level (required 400-level course outside a student’s major).
“As members of an institution of higher education, the nature of our responsibilities compels each one of us to do as much as we can to transform our students and ourselves into citizens who can effectively address the mounting environmental, social and economic challenges before us,” he wrote.
Support weak
John Glass, coordinator of the Campus Sustainability Initiative, said his office recently tried to determine how many faculty members were teaching courses with a sustainability component; he received about 40 responses.
“The challenge is, number one, how do we engage the faculty?” he said.
The sustainability movement really started to ramp up about five or six years ago, he said, and WSU has made great strides in a number of areas, but curricular support for sustainability is still weak.
“In all the universities that have tried to tackle this problem,” he said, “that’s the major challenge.”
The general education curriculum already has a focus on environmental issues, Law wrote, but sustainability brings another level of awareness.
Can’t have too much
“Learning about sustainability often has practical and applied implications involving behavior changes that other kinds of environmental studies do not necessarily have,” he wrote. “Therefore, in my view, we can’t have too much on the subject.”
Law said his definition of sustainability is quite broad, including anything that deals with resource depletion or that links human activities with systems of reuse. Many faculty members are dealing with these issues, he said, but their efforts are still largely unconnected in the curriculum, except in a few programs.
“What I think we have is a critical mass of people who are profoundly interested in this issue who don’t know about each other,” he said.
For more information about WSU’s sustainability initiative, go to www.sustainability.wsu.edu. For more information about curriculum support for sustainability, go to www.aashe.org, the website of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
