Curriculum for the Bioregion Initiative
Big Ideas,
Learning Outcomes, Skills, and References
Relevant to a
Sustainability Course or Curriculum
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Fall 2011 Sustainability Faculty Learning Community Web site
maintained by: Robert J. Turner Assistant
Professor of Environmental Science Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences |
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The Problem this Web Site Addresses
Sustainability courses and programs have been proliferating on
college and university campuses over the last decade. However, education focused on sustainability
is not based on a shared consensus of
important concepts or curricular organization.
What are the big ideas, learning outcomes, and skills that courses and
programs should be designed around? What
should we expect students of sustainability to know and do? What are coherent pathways and preferred
pedagogies to help students achieve sustainability learning objectives? This web site doesn’t address all of these
unknowns. But it does offer lists of big
ideas, learning outcomes, skills and references that are relevant to an
education focused on sustainability.
About this Web Site
What follows are a series of web pages, each featuring a list of
big ideas, learning outcomes, or skills that could be featured in a
sustainability course or curriculum. As
sustainability is a very broad and transdisciplinary
concept, any list of what could be included in a sustainability education can
be very large. The challenge is in
choosing what to focus on in any given course.
If nothing else, these lists can serve as the basis for a glossary of
sustainability course content.
This listing of big ideas, learning outcomes, and skills has
been developed over time through a series of workshops hosted by the Curriculum for the Bioregion, an initiative of
The
Washington Center at The Evergreen State College. Over 100 faculty members from over a dozen
colleges and universities in the state of Washington have contributed to this
list. In 2011 a Sustainability Faculty
Learning Community was formed, consisting of ~15 faculty members from 10
colleges. This group of academics
discussed and beefed up the list considerably.
Rob Turner of University of Washington Bothell re-organized the list in
the categories seen in the matrix below, added more terms, simplified the
language of the list, and included links to relevant references.
The link that follows this sentence is a much more succinct take
on this summarizing of sustainability big ideas, skills, and habits of mind
created by Dr. Claus Svendsen of Skagit Valley Community College. Sustainability
Infusion Flow Chart.
Web Site Pages - Click a title and
go!
Have any problems
with this web site or questions? Contact
Rob Turner at rturner@uwb.edu.