Sustainability in higher education

The new byword at the college where I work is sustainability. At our recent faculty professional development meeting, we heard presentations by representatives from three different academic institutions that have integrated the concepts and practices of sustainability into their curricula and into their institutional cultures. Although I can't speak for my colleagues, I found the presentations stimulating, and I'm intrigued by the possibilities opened up by this new focus.

An emphasis on environmental sustainability has broad implications for a high profile public institution - everything from ordinary practices like recycling, conserving electricity, water use, and paper use to larger considerations such as availability of mass transit for students, limits on parking, and the construction of green buildings.

In a fairly recent article in Planning for Higher Education, historian Peter Bardaglio, discussed how four different institutions, Northern Arizona University, Emory University, Berea College and Ithaca College are incorporating sustainability into their curricula. See: Bardaglio, Peter W. "A Moment of Grace" Integrating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum." Planning for Higher Education 36, no. 1 (October/December 2007): 16-22.

Bardaglio draws on the work of other scholars to explain that values of ecological sustainability present a challenge to the dominant paradigm in higher education. That is, most teaching and learning takes place within defined disciplinary boudaries, and concerns either "first order" learning about sustainability, or "second order" learning that emphasizes acquiring the skills needed to effect change. He notes that many scholars point to the need for a "third order" learning in which "continual exploration through practice" contributes to an educational environment that enables students to use their creativity to understand sustainability in a larger context, and to make connections that can lead to solving real-word problems. (Bardaglio, 17-18)

The examples that Bardaglio gives of integration of sustainability into higher education curricula run the gamut from creating institutes that reach accross disciplinary boundaries to train faculty how to integrate environmental consciousness into their subjects, to the creation of green and self-suffcient student housing, and partnering with non-profits to create project based sustainabiliy field work for students in a variety of areas. These, of course, are only first steps, but they illustrate the kinds of strides that can be made when institutions act creatively, partner with other institutions and with outside groups, and seek grants from the federal government and from foundations.

For teaching faculty, and for those of us who are instruction librarians, the focus on sustainability represents both an opportunity and a challenge. Without exception, the library staff have embraced the new emphasis on sustainability. It has stimulated new thinking about collection development, library instruction, and even circulation procedures. This creates an opportunity for the library to take the lead in supporting an important new value in the college's institutional culture. We are also challenged to be ready to meet the needs of students with new assignments focused on sustainability, and to help faculty find the materials they need to design such assignments.

Many teaching faculty have also expressed enthusiasm about the new focus, and we are already seeing requests to design library instruction modules around sustainability issues. Some, however, feel that they are already incorporating some aspect of environmental awareness into their courses in the form of current affairs and environmental science assignments. Others wonder how these issues are directly relevant to the educational content that they deliver, and some resent the idea of yet another college mandate that they must shoehorn into their already crowded syllabi.

Certainly, these are not unimportant objections. But, I hope that over time growing information about sustainability combined with increased sustainable practices will help to achieve a kind of critical mass, so that this issue will become so natural that it is integrated into the curriculum as a matter of course, much as issues of diversity are already.