| Overall Rating | Silver |
|---|---|
| Overall Score | 56.16 |
| Liaison | Matthew Liesch |
| Submission Date | May 13, 2024 |
Central Michigan University
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses
| Status | Score | Responsible Party |
|---|---|---|
|
2.00 / 2.00 |
Eric
Urbaniak Student Reviewer OID |
Does the institution have an ongoing program that offers incentives for academic staff in multiple disciplines or departments to develop new sustainability courses and/or incorporate sustainability into existing courses? :
A brief description of the incentive program(s):
Under the "Sustainability and Resilience Curriculum Coordinator" program, a professor from Central Michigan University's Department of Geography and Environmental Studies has university-paid release time for the 2024 academic year to coordinate a group of faculty from multiple departments to improve sustainability curriculum at CMU. This is coordinated through the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and Sustainability and Environmental Policy Programs at CMU. As a result, sustainability has become an integrated aspect of numerous courses and programming at CMU. For example, it is discussed in the Environmental Studies, Science, and Engineering majors. Sustainability curriculum has become very desired among students at CMU in the past three years, which is part of the reason the department has recently created a new minor in Sustainability and Environmental Policy, which has become very popular since it went into effect in the fall of 2014.
A brief description of the incentives that academic staff who participate in the program(s) receive:
CMU academic staff who participate in the program are able to interact with students passionate about sustainability in a wide variety of areas. Academic staff are also able to count advancing sustainability education as part of their service work as faculty. They are able to concentrate their courses around special issues pertaining to sustainability and have been able to find an enthusiastic student population. They are able to expand past the course and facilitate independent research studies with students especially passionate about certain sustainability topics, such as how sustainability is linked with DEIJ initiatives and how universities are approaching climate action planning. These studies have produced numerous journal articles that are in the process of being published in scholarly journals, boosting the academic integrity of the university's sustainability teachings and research. While not as formal as the special "Sustainability and Resilience Curriculum Coordinator" program, these are crucial incentives that motivate many academic staff to advance sustainability education.
Website URL where information about the incentives for developing sustainability course content is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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