Teaching Sustainability / Teaching Sustainably

About this book

Over the coming decades, every academic discipline will have to respond to the paradigm of more sustainable life practices because students will be living in a world challenged by competition for resources and climate change, and will demand that every academic discipline demonstrate substantial and corresponding relevance.

This book takes as its point of departure that integrating a component of sustainability into a discipline-specific course arises from an educator asking a simple question: in the coming decades, as humanity faces unprecedented challenges, what can my discipline or area of research contribute toward a better understanding of these issues? The discipline need not be future-oriented: an archaeologist, for instance, could incorporate into a course some aspects of sustainable archaeological practices in areas threatened by rapid climate change, as well as examples of sustainable or unsustainable ways of living practiced by members of the long-gone society under investigation.

This book also argues that courses about sustainability need to cross disciplinary boundaries, both because of the inter-relatedness of the issues, and because students will require the ability to use interdisciplinary approaches to thrive through the multiple careers most of them will face.

The contributions to this book are presented under four sections. "Sustainability as a Core Value in Education" considers the rationale for incorporating sustainability in disciplinary courses. "Teaching Sustainability in the Academic Disciplines" presents eight examples of courses from disciplines as varied as agriculture, composition, engineering, and teacher education. "Education as a Sustainable Practice" reviews how the physical environment of the classroom and the delivery of instruction need themselves to reflect the values being taught. The final section addresses the issues of leadership and long-term institutional change needed to embed sustainable practice as a core value on campus.

Contents

I. Sustainability as a Core Value in Education
- Sustainability for Everyone: Trespassing Disciplinary Boundaries
- Sustainability as a Core Issue in Diversity and Critical Thinking Education
- Sustainable Happiness and Education: Educating Teachers and Students in the 21st Century
- A Christian Approach to Sustainability

II. Teaching Sustainability in the Academic Disciplines
- Re-Envisioning Ecocomposition: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Energy and the Ecology of Writing
- Sustainably Growing Farmers of the Future: Undergraduate Curriculum in Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Kentucky
- Using a Multi-level Approach to Teach Sustainability to Undergraduate Students in Engineering and Environmental Science
- Environmental Sustainability in Healthcare Management Education
- Teaching Ecotourism in the Backyard of Waikiki, Hawai'i
- Writing Banana Republics and Guano Bonanzas: Consumerism and Globalization in the Composition Classroom
- The Hungry Text: Toward a Sustainable Literary Food Pedagogy
- Who Will Teach the Teachers? Re-orienting Teacher Education for the Values of Sustainability

III. Education as a Sustainable Practice
- Eportfolios in a Liberal Studies Program: An Experiment in Sustainability
- The Paperless Classroom
- Communicating Sustainability: Teaching Sustainable Media Practice
- Unsustainable Aspects of Sustainability

IV. Leadership and Reform Strategies for Long-term Institutional Change
- Teaching Sustainability Leadership
- Teaching Sustainability to Future Professionals in Cultural Resource Organizations
- Breaking the "Methodological Trap" of Sustainability in Academia with Global Learning Environments
- Making Sustainability a Core Value

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