University of Alaska Southeast
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

Sustainability-focused courses concentrate on the concept of sustainability, including its social, economic, cultural, 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. • 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 
and reason holistically. • Contributes to the understanding of cultural sustainability through practice or investigation of Alaska’s cultures. A course does not have to accomplish all of these things to be designated as sustainability-related or sustainability-focused.

Faculty were asked to fill out a short survey detailing courses which were sustainabilty-focused or sustainability-related