Raritan Valley Community College
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

Sustainability-focused courses concentrate on the concept of sustainability, including its social, economic, and environmental dimensions, or examine an issue or topic using sustainability as a lens. Sustainability-related courses incorporate sustainability as a distinct course component or module or concentrate on a single sustainability principle or issue. The goal of sustainability education is to provide students, regardless of their courses of study, the knowledge and skills to help create a healthy economy, society, and environment. 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. • Understand and be able to effectively communicate the concept of sustainability. • Develop and use an ethical perspective in which they view themselves as embedded in the fabric of an interconnected world, such as a humanistic perspective about unintended consequences in a systems context. • Become aware of and explore the connections between their chosen course of study and sustainability. • Develop technical skills or expertise necessary to implement sustainable solutions. • Understand the way in which sustainable thinking and decision-making contributes to the process of creating solutions for current and emerging social, environmental, and economic crises. • Contribute practical solutions to real-world sustainability challenges. • Synthesize understanding of social, economic, and environmental systems.\ • Reason holistically, creatively, and contextually, using systems thinking and drawing on experience and observation. A course does not have to accomplish all of these things to be designated as sustainability-related or sustainability-focused.

A subcommittee of the Sustainability Committee met to approve a definition of sustainability in the curriculum. The head of the Environmental Studies program and faculty members of the Sustainability Committee identified known courses and verified that they met the definition of sustainability in the curriculum. One member sent an email to all faculty to identify additional courses, and included the definition in this email. This resulted in the identification of several additional courses to the sustainbility-related course list.