Bowdoin College
AC-1: Academic Courses

The sustainability office completed an initial inventory based on class lists from the registrar's office and cross-referenced with descriptions in the course catalogue. The office then worked with the office of academic affairs to send out a survey to all 219 instructional faculty teaching classes (excluding music courses dedicated to performance, technique, or composition) during the 2022–2023 academic year asking if they agreed with our assessment of their courses or not. We received an 81 percent response rate from the survey where faculty had to self-select whether their courses fit the description. Faculty were asked if the content of their courses were "inclusive" or "focused" to any of the UN's seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. In the survey, faculty had to specifically click "sustainability inclusive", "sustainability focused", or "not sustainability related". The survey indicated that sustainability focused courses refers to courses where the primary and explicit focus of the course is on sustainability and/or on understanding or solving one or more major sustainability challenges. Sustainability related courses primarily focus on a topic other than sustainability, but incorporate a unit or module on sustainability or a sustainability challenge as part of the course. Courses not related to sustainability meet neither of the requirements above.

If a course is offered multiple times during the year it is included in our overall course number multiple times as that is the way the registrar gets their overall total course count. In a few cases the same course may be offered by more than one faculty member and it is only included in this list if the individual faculty member self-identified their course as such. For example, Principles of Microeconomics is listed multiple times by different faculty members – each one self-identified in the survey that their version of the course included sustainability in specific topics or lessons.