California State University, Channel Islands
ER-14: Incentives for Developing Sustainability Courses

Incentives for Developing Sustainability Courses Faculty Development to Support Faculty in their Efforts to Provide Sustainability Course Offerings Faculty Development is not an academic program that offers courses or degrees. Instead, it is a support office whose efforts are to help align faculty instructional effort in supporting students to succeed in achieving the larger learning goals and outcomes of the university. (1) Travel Support for development of an interdisciplinary campus symposium. (2) Annual winter writing retreat. (3) Guest lectures involve conveying the kinds of student learning needed to do successful interdisciplinary high-level evaluative thinking that is required for understanding and applying concepts of sustainability. (4) Funded projects that pay participating faculty small stipends ($500 per semester) include Faculty Learning Communities for "Design of Deep Learning Exercises" and an ongoing project to develop a Science Literacy Concept Inventory. A short Sustainability Literacy Concept Inventory is being developed as both a teaching aid and an assessment instrument. (5) Faculty minigrants: These small grants average about $7000 per faculty and faculty receive support primarily in form of release time to pursue innovative scholarship and teaching innovation. Additional information is available at http://facultydevelopment.csuci.edu/, especially the tab links: assessment of student learning (under construction), Mini-grant program, and Faculty Resources.

General incentives include sponsorship of funding for professional development, training in demonstrating effective student learning (assessment), workshops in teaching and assessment, retreats, in-class guest lectures on learning, ethics and critical thinking. Specific examples are listed above.

http://www.csuci.edu/sustainability/stars/education-and-research/developing-sustainability-courses.htm