California State University, Long Beach
AC-1: Academic Courses

We employed a rigorous, multi-step process in developing this course inventory. First, our Sustainability Task Force's Curriculum Working Group created a survey which was emailed to all faculty on campus to gather information about courses currently being offered that focus on or incorporate sustainability (the same survey was used to gather information for AC - 8: Campus as a Living Lab and AC-9: Research and Scholarship). The results of the survey were then reviewed by the Working Group and individual faculty members were contacted to obtain further information and/or clarification about their survey responses. Unfortunately, the survey response rate was quite low and did not provide enough information to enable us to build a comprehensive list. Also, many of the courses faculty self-identified as "sustainability courses" or "courses that include sustainability" led the Working Group to determine that the definitions we had provided in the survey were too broad to provide faculty with sufficient parameters. As a result, the Working Group went back to the drawing board and decided to set an extremely high bar with regards to which courses to include and exclude from the list of courses. The Working Group determined that in order to be included on this list, the word "sustainability" would need to appear in the official Standard Course Outline (SCO) or, in some rare cases when the SCO was unavailable, in the course syllabus. In order to determine which SCOs/syllabi would need to be reviewed, Student Assistants in the Office of Planning and Sustainability read through the entire course catalog and created a list of all courses that had even the most remote possibility of including sustainability concepts or content. These courses were added to the list of courses previously identified via the survey and the SCOs/syllabi for those courses were requested from each College and Department. Next, the Student Assistants read through each of the SCOs/syllabi and highlighted the term "sustainability" if and when it appeared. In a few limited cases, key terms such as "environmental," "ecological" or "environmental justice" were highlighted and included in the list of courses to be considered. Finally, the Curriculum Working Group and Sustainability Coordinator reviewed the highlighted SCOs/syllabi and made final determinations about which courses to include in the inventory and whether they should be designated as "Sustainability Courses" or "Courses that Include Sustainability."

The entire process took over a year to complete and was extremely labor intensive, particularly reviewing the course catalog and obtaining the SCOs, which, unfortunately, are not centrally archived by the University. However, we were very motivated to create a list that accurately represents the courses our university currently offers in which students would be guaranteed to not just learn about discrete topics which are tangentially related to sustainability (such as "economy" or "nature"), but to actually gain an understanding of the interconnected concept of sustainability itself. We also have the goal of developing a Sustainability Minor program in the near future and we hoped that this list could serve as a resource for building that program.

Reporting year: 2015-16