Maryville College
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

Two programs are currently in place to allow for incentives for faculty to integrate sustainability into their current courses, and/or potentially have them considered for inclusion in the sustainability studies minor elective segment. One program is a faculty workshop on sustainability that has been offered to faculty every year since 2011. This program, taught by sustainability faculty and sustainability professionals provides faculty the opportunity to learn about sustainability and resilience and see examples of it in different disciplines and courses. It is open to all faculty, and the faculty are provided a stipend for participating in the entire workshop. They are also asked to edit a current syllabus they will be teaching for the next year and integrate sustainability projects, principles, etc into the course. One of the positive outcomes is that faculty who have participated in the previous year and integrated sustainability into their course are invited back to present to the new faculty about their experiences, results and outcomes from the process. Many faculty have quantitative and qualitative data they are able to share about their integration. The second program is an environmental mini-grant program that all faculty have been allowed to apply for to receive funding to integrate a sustainability-related project or activity to their existing disciplinary courses or programs. For example, a faculty member could apply for funding to receive software for a statistics course that would track energy usage for a particular building so the students would be able to analyze the data as a class project. The funding amounts vary per application, but the written application is reviewed by a faculty grant administrator and, if approved, the faculty member completes the projects and provides a report back to the grant administrator expounding upon how sustainability has been integrated into the course/program they were working on.

In the faculty workshop model, faculty have received stipends for their participation in the program. In the environmental mini-grant model, faculty have received funding for their project/program and that funding amount varied based on the quality of the application and how it meets the requirements of the grant.