Susan Swensen and Jason Hamilton jointly presented a talk entitled "Broadening Participation in Sustainability" at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Conference at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, in October.
Their presentation outlined how sustainability has spread through the Ithaca College campus and what events have been important in broadening participation by faculty and students.
Integrating sustainability into the college curriculum requires the participation of a broad range of faculty representing different professional disciplines. Often faculty participation in sustainability education is nucleated in only one or a few academic areas and fails to spread more broadly. Ithaca College has implemented several programs aimed at attracting new faculty into our sustainability initiative. These programs include a building-based sustainability group, a campus-wide seminar series, a mini-grant program, a partnership with EcoVillage at Ithaca, and sustainability-focused courses that emphasize experiential learning. This presentation will describe how and where these different programs evolved, how they changed over time, and where they are headed in the future.
Cultivating student buy-in and participation in sustainability requires the development of a range of meaningful projects for student involvement. Without these opportunities, the call for sustainability rings hollow and can quickly be viewed as a publicity stunt. Since Ithaca College launched its sustainability initiative, there has been an ever-increasing call for substantive ways in which students can participate and produce tangible results. In the biology department and the environmental studies program, we were able to adapt an existing course infrastructure to provide many opportunities for student participation and impact. These involve projects as diverse as teaching student-developed courses, affecting policy decisions for land management, building solar demonstration installations, partnering with local businesses, and altering energy-use behavior of faculty and students. In this part we will discuss the successes, failures, and lessons learned for integrating sustainability fully into the students’ educational experience.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20061017142805352