University of California, Berkeley
AC-2: Learning Outcomes

The American Cultures requirement is a Berkeley campus requirement, one that all undergraduate students at Berkeley need to pass in order to graduate. The requirement was instituted in 1991 to introduce students to the diverse cultures of the United States through a comparative framework. Courses are offered in more than fifty departments in many different disciplines at both the lower and upper division level.

The American Cultures requirement and courses constitute a new approach that responds directly to the problem encountered in numerous disciplines of how better to present the diversity of American experience to the diversity of American students whom we now educate.

Faculty members from many departments teach American cultures courses, but all courses have a common framework. The courses focus on themes or issues in United States history, society, or culture; address theoretical or analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society; take substantial account of groups drawn from at least three of the following: African Americans, indigenous peoples of the United States, Asian Americans, Chicano/Latino Americans, and European Americans; and are integrative and comparative in that students study each group in the larger context of American society, history, or culture.

These courses focus upon how the diversity of America's constituent cultural traditions have shaped and continue to shape American identity and experience. This is not an ethnic studies requirement, nor a Third World cultures requirement, nor an adjusted Western civilization requirement, nor a course on racism.

The American Cultures requirement meets the STARS definition of sustainability-inclusive in the following ways:
- Students will be able to demonstrate an understanding of the nature of systems.
- Students will have an understanding of their social responsibility as future professionals and citizens.
- Students will be able to accommodate individual differences in their decisions and actions and be able to negotiate across these differences.
- Students will be able to analyze power, structures of inequality, and social systems that govern individual and communal life.
- Students will be able to recognize the global implications of their actions.

An undergraduate student fellow at the Office of Sustainability specifically chosen to work on the STARS v2.2 report reviewed the all UC Berkeley Graduate- and Bachelor-level degrees and identified degree programs that:
(P) Have been identified as a sustainability-focused program,
(L) Have adopted sustainability-focused learning outcomes, OR
(C) Require a sustainability-focused course

The Office of Planning & Analysis (OPA) provided a spreadsheet with all of the degree programs from the last three years, and the fellow marked the rows of students from degree programs that require an understanding of the concept of sustainability. OPA then provided the total campus headcount and the percentages of undergraduates and graduates earning degrees in a program with a sustainability learning outcome.

The total headcount of students earning degrees in 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 in a field with a sustainability learning outcome is made up of a tally of all graduate and undergraduate students who received a degree from departments and programs that require sustainability-themed coursework.