The University of British Columbia
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

In 2009, the "Academic Programs Working Group" (APWG) of UBC's President's Advisory Council on Sustainabilty developed a framework for identifying UBC's sustainability courses. The APWG comprised 15 members, including 2 students, 1 staff, and 12 faculty members representing nine of UBC's 14 faculties. For membership, see: http://www.sas.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/APWG_MembershipSept09.pdf. The course framework is based on a modified three pillar definition of sustainability (environment, society, economy & technology) and the descriptions for sustainability-related and sustainability-focused courses provided by STARS. For details of the course framework, see: http://www.sas.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/course-framework.pdf. Sustainability courses are those that fall inside the sustainability “box”. Technology is added to the Economy pillar to explicitly acknowledge the role of technology in achieving a future that is both desirable and achievable in ecological, social and economic terms.

UBC employed self-identification to create our inventory of sustainability courses. To aid faculty members in self-identifying their courses, the APWG examined ALL UBC courses (undergraduate and graduate) by course title and senate approved course description, and selected over 600 potential sustainability courses based on the course framework described above. Each potential sustainability course was then allocated to one of the following 4 categories: category 1 = overlap of the three pillars (sustainability-focused), category 2 = overlap of two pillars (sustainability-related; categories 2a, 2b, 2c), category 3 = one pillar (sustainability-related), and category 4 = discipline-specific courses outside the "sustainability box". For more details, see: http://www.sas.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/course-framework.pdf. The APWG then emailed all Deans, Department Heads and course instructors with the initial categorization of their sustainability courses and asked for feedback. We received feedback on over 60% of the pre-identified courses, resulting in the current list of over 350 sustainability courses.