Overall Rating Gold
Overall Score 75.28
Liaison Kara Holmstrom
Submission Date Feb. 25, 2022

STARS v2.2

Luther College
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 2.00 / 2.00 Jon Jensen
Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies
Philosophy, Environmental Studies
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

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? :
Yes

A brief description of the incentive program(s):
Luther College offers multiple incentives for incorporating sustainability into new and existing courses including the following:
- faculty development workshops focused on sustainability in the curriculum
- financial incentives for faculty who create a new course or modify an existing course to include sustainability (as funding is available)
- a learning community of faculty who provide mutual support and guidance in the process of course development to include sustainability.

Luther College has been working to incorporate sustainability in the curriculum in various ways for over 10 years. This started when two Luther faculty members attended an AASHE sustainability across the curriculum workshop in January 2008. That sparked a series of summer workshops and a multi-pronged approach to reaching every department with information about sustainability in the curriculum. In recent years, the Center for Sustainable Communities has partnered with the Dean's Office to develop faculty development programming to continue this work including financial incentives for new course development. This program included a workshop in the summer modeled on AASHE's sustainability across the curriculum workshops. After the summer workshop, faculty involved met monthly for six months to share ideas and resources and provided mutual accountability as they developed their courses. This program ran annually for six years until faculty interest was no longer sufficient to run annual workshops. Recently, the Center for Sustainable Communities has offered workshops and a summer learning community through Luther’s new Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT). Faculty receive a small stipend for attending a workshop and a larger course development grant when they participate in a CELT learning community to develop or significantly revise a course.

A brief description of the incentives that academic staff who participate in the program(s) receive:
Faculty participants have received up to $1200 for successfully completing the course development learning community program. Current stipends are currently $500 due to budget constraints.

Faculty participants in faculty development workshops receive $50-100.

Optional Fields 

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:
https://www.luther.edu/celt/

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