Overall Rating Gold - expired
Overall Score 83.20
Liaison Maddie LoDico
Submission Date Nov. 5, 2018
Executive Letter Download

STARS v2.1

Colby College
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 2.00 / 2.00 James Sloat
Assistant Dean of Faculty for Academic Development
Deans Office
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Does the institution have an ongoing program or programs that offer incentives for faculty in multiple disciplines or departments to develop new sustainability courses and/or incorporate sustainability into existing courses?:
Yes

A brief description of the program(s), including positive outcomes during the previous three years (e.g. descriptions of new courses or course content resulting from the program):
This past school year, the Colby Center for Arts and Humanities implemented an Environmental Humanities program. Funded for four years by an $800,000 Mellon Foundation grant, the multidisciplenary initiative will bring together both scientists and humanists to find solutions for the global environmental crisis. The goal of the Environmental Humanities program is to help students think about the environement and sustainability as a human issue, not just a scientific, political, or economic issue, and ways that we interact with the environment that produce humanist results. In April, 2017, the inaugrual fellow activist Winona LaDuke, spent a few days at Colby giving lectures and teaching students. In the Fall of 2017, the new Postdoc in Environmental Humanities will offer a new course entitled "Environmental Humanities: Stories of Crisis and Resilience" (EN283). Other courses that will be offered under the new Environmental Humanities program include English Composition: Environmental Imagination (EN115), Central Philosophical Issues: Nature and God (PL114), Art and Maine (AR347), and Ecological History (HI394). In the 2015-2016 academic year, the Colby Center for Arts and Humanities chose the theme "Humans and Nature," which resulted in nearly all departments on campus sponsoring an environment-related course.

A brief description of the incentives that faculty members who participate in the program(s) receive:
For Environmental Humanities curriculum, professors receive grants to develop courses. In the 2015-16 academic year, professors who chose to tailor their curriculum to the Human and Nature theme received funding to bring in speakers, films, or other content they deemed appropriate.

Optional Fields 

The website URL where information about the programs or initiatives is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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