New Mexico State University
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

Sustainability meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability in the curriculum encourages students to make connections between the knowledge and skills addressed in traditional, discipline-based course offerings with their applications by practitioners, policymakers, and consumers to help create a sustainably configured economy, society, and environment. Sustainability curriculum provides students with the background and skills necessary to address problems related to energy, the environment, culture and society, and economic development as interdependent and interconnected processes that transcend individual disciplines. Sustainably-focused and Sustainability-related classes typically include one or more of the following topics: 1. Technical: learning processes for sustainable actions (e.g., analytical tools, practical training, experimentation with energy systems and materials). 2. Cultural and Human Ecology: learning about cultures around the world and connecting globally to benefit societies around the world (e.g., ethics, family systems and community organizations and their relationship to food production, water issues, and sustainable use of renewable and nonrenewable cultural and natural resources). 3. Management: learning management skills related to sustainability (e.g., leadership skills, innovative technology and systems thinking) 4. Integration of multiple skills: using interdisciplinary skills learned from various departments across the college (e.g., integrating natural and social sciences, analytical methods, and critical reasoning skills to evaluate renewable and nonrenewable resource issues) 5. Economics and Sustainable Development: all layers of sustainability must include the economics of keeping environmental systems alive (e.g., theoretical environmental, ecological, and natural resource economics that teaches students cost-benefit and financial analysis including environmental impacts and issues in the analysis). 6. Biological and Environmental Systems (e.g., development of models that explain maintenance and loss of biodiversity and using that knowledge for sustainable management and conservation). Sustainability-focused courses concentrate on the concept of sustainability, including its socio-cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions, or examine an issue or topic using sustainability as a lens. To be considered sustainability-focused, the course should include two or more of the sustainability educational objectives listed below. Sustainability-related courses incorporate sustainability as a distinct course component or module, or concentrate on a single sustainability principle or issue. To be considered sustainability-related, a course should include one or more of the sustainability educational objectives listed below. Sustainability Educational Objectives In order to determine whether or not a course has this goal in mind, it is useful to ask whether or not a given course will help students to achieve one or more of the following. 1. Understand and be able to effectively communicate the concept of sustainability. 2. Develop and use an ethical perspective in which they explain how sustainability relates to their lives and values, and how their actions impact issues of sustainability. 3. Become aware of and explain how economy, society, culture, energy, and the environment are interrelated, making connections between their chosen course of study and sustainability. 4. Develop technical skills or expertise necessary to implement sustainable solutions. 5. Explain the ways in which sustainable thinking and decision-making contributes to the process of creating solutions for current and emerging social, environmental, and economic crises. 6. Apply concepts of sustainability locally (e.g. to change daily habits and consumption patterns) and globally by engaging in the challenges and solutions of sustainability in a world context. 7. Synthesize understanding of the interconnections among social, cultural, economic, energy, and environmental systems and reason holistically.

As an agriculture and engineering college we have a great number of classes related to the environment, ecology, sustainability, food production, and policy that are both related and focused on sustainability issues. Five years ago a diverse committee of faculty went through the class catalogue and compiled our list of sustainably-oriented classes, whether focused or related. The group reviewed the class description and determined whether it met the requirements of the definitions listed above. In fall of 2012, NMSU’s sustainability council convened a new group of faculty to revise the definitions and update the previous course listing. We first combed through the undergraduate and graduate catalogs to compile a list of all majors, minors, certificates, concentrations, and options that were sustainability related. Then, we ran several key word searches through the course catalogs to identify new courses that were sustainability focused or sustainability related. Finally, we gave the lists to Institutional analysis to determine how many students had graduated from the list of sustainability programs in the last three years; how many students were currently enrolled in sustainability related or focused classes; and how many students had currently declared a sustainability concentration as a major or minor.