California Polytechnic State University
EN-6: Assessing Sustainability Culture

The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Cal Poly organized a Teaching Sustainability Across the Curriculum learning community. The learning community supports an interdisciplinary group of faculty who work to improve sustainability culture and attitude across campus. In 2017 the group collaborated to develop an assessment of current sustainability practices and a survey of stakeholder knowledge and attitudes on sustainability. In order to draft this survey, faculty used examples from other STARS participating institutions who scored high in this category.

How do you gauge your own knowledge on sustainability? How do you define sustainability? How important do you think sustainability is? Why do you think that? Do you think sustainability learning is important to include in the Cal Poly curriculum? How does Cal Poly teach sustainability? What courses have you taken that discuss sustainability or focus on sustainability? (Students). What courses have you taught that present information on sustainability? (Faculty) What prevents you from receiving more sustainability instruction at Cal Poly? (Students). What prevents you from providing more sustainability instruction at Cal Poly? (Faculty). What are some ways to make sustainability education more accessible at Cal Poly?

Given the lack of existing data on sustainability attitudes among Cal Poly students and faculty, qualitative methods were deemed the most appropriate for data collection and analysis. Data were collected using semistructured interviews [23], in which a set of open-ended questions were prepared to guide the interview process but might be asked in a particular order or format. Interview questions were designed to gauge each participant’s general sustainability knowledge and attitudes, to assess how sustainability is approached as a learning objective across disciplines, and to identify potential barriers to teaching sustainability across the curriculum. A total of 17 faculty and 39 student interviewees from six colleges at Cal Poly (i.e., agriculture, architecture, business, engineering, liberal arts, and science and math) voluntarily participated in this survey. Students were recruited from large general education (GE) courses within a variety of disciplines and provided minimal assignment extra credit incentives for participation. The large GE courses chosen were defined as courses with over 125 students where all academic departments were represented in the possible student pool. Recruitment announcements were made in four such classes. Third-year and fourth year students were specifically targeted as they would have more class experience to draw upon.

Of the 39 student responses, 22 were noted as having a high level of sustainability knowledge, and 17 were noted as having a low level of sustainability knowledge. Of the 17 faculty responses, 10 were noted as having a high level of sustainability knowledge, and 7 were noted as having a low level of sustainability knowledge. Participants were grouped in this way in order to develop a deeper understanding of how their prior interest and/or knowledge regarding sustainability might impact their attitude of sustainability. An a priori assumption was that sustainability ‘adherents’ (i.e., those students and faculty with prior or continued exposure to sustainability education) would represent a qualitatively different subset of responses with a generally more positive attitude toward sustainability education due to their understanding of the importance of sustainability practices. Given this a priori assumption, the analysis sought to identify whether the barriers and solutions identified by students and faculty were similar regardless of their adherence to or knowledge about sustainability, or whether those with more knowledge about or adherence to sustainability practices would identify different types of barriers for curriculum development.

Based on feedback from Humboldt States third party review and STARS staff, the assessment as it stands does not fully qualify as a thorough sustainability culture assessment.