University of California, Irvine
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

In 2012, an ad hoc group of UCI faculty from at least three different departments agreed upon the following definition of sustainability in the curriculum: "Sustainability is a dynamic process that recognizes, promotes, and protects the intrinsic value and equitable endurance of natural and human systems in the present and the future. As a dynamic process, sustainability becomes the unifying characteristic of decision-making about and processes of production, consumption, resource use, waste, and ecological systems." “Sustainability-focused” courses concentrate on sustainability, including its social, economic and environmental dimensions, or examine an issue or topic using sustainability as a lens. The courses provide valuable grounding in the concepts and principles of sustainability. To be sustainability-focused, the majority (50% or more) of the course content (e.g., readings, papers, tests, discussion or other assignments) must focus on at least one of the 13 sustainability criteria listed below. “Sustainability-related” courses include sustainability as a course component or module, or concentrate on a specific sustainability principle or issue. The courses help build knowledge about a component of sustainability or introduce students to sustainability concepts during part of the course. To be sustainability-related, at least 25% of the course content (e.g., readings, papers, tests, discussion or other assignments) must focus on at least one of the 13 sustainability criteria listed below. Sustainability Criteria* 1) Sustainability as a concept: the history, politics, culture and science of ideas of sustainability and sustainable development. 2) Natural limits: the relationship between human population and lifestyle in relation to the finite capacity of natural ecosystems (including the global ecosystem) to provide for human needs. 3) Maintaining ecosystems: Natural resource conservation science and practices to maintain the integrity of ecosystems in the face of rising human demands. 4) Business and economics: Re-shaping market conditions to address “market failures” with respect to the environment and to provide incentives for businesses and economic systems to better maintain the integrity of ecosystems. 5) Social capacity: The social factors that support behavioral shifts (including but not limited to economic choices) necessary to enable and encourage societies to live in ways compatible with maintaining the long-term integrity of ecosystems. 6) Social equity: The mutual interactions between social inequality and environmental degradation, including theories of social reforms required to ensure an environmentally healthy and socially just society. 7) Sustainability discourse: The framing and discussion of environmental sustainability in the media, politics, and everyday life. 8) Culture, religion, and ethics: How culture, religion, and ethics—from consumerism to environmental stewardship—shape human behavior toward the natural world. 9) Governance: How legal frameworks and policies shape human behavior toward the natural world. 10) Science and Technology: The role of basic science and technology (broadly and individual technologies) specifically in influencing human impacts on the natural world. 11) Planning and design: Concepts and techniques from urban, regional, and rural planning and/or building design and/or product design that can influence human impacts on the environment and environmental impacts on humans. 12) Sustainability science: The new field of sustainability science that specifically attempts to build interdisciplinary perspectives from the themes (and related academic disciplines) listed above to promote human-environmental balance. 13) Other emerging fields and topics relevant to sustainability. *This list of sustainability criteria was adapted from Weber State University and University of Oregon’s STARS Curriculum Definitions.

In Fall 2011, the Manager of Special Projects in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Administrative and Business Services at UCI, Kathy Haq, compiled a broad list of environment and sustainability courses from the 2011-2012 UCI course catalog. In Winter 2012, the UCI Environment Institute convened a Sustainability Curriculum Assessment Team (SCAT) comprised of 15 student volunteers. They were: Brenna Jordan, Emily McVey, Mikhael Kazzi, Sara Isozaki, Josh Gisi, Karen Thai, Jaimie Wan, Dahnish Shams, Geoff Bernd, Sydney Torres, Ali Murphy, Matt Petrofsky, and Rosie Said. SCAT applied the newly established definition of sustainability in the curriculum to the previously compiled course list to distinguish among courses that were sustainability-focused, sustainability-related, and not related to sustainability. SCAT then cross checked these results against a preliminary sustainability curriculum assessment carried out by a Subcommittee of the UCI Sustainability Committee in 2007 and removed courses that UCI has not offered within the last three years. Updating the methodology: This year’s ranking reflects courses only offered in AY 2012-2013. In February 2013, the UCI Environment Institute assessed the AY 2011-2012 sustainability course lists by asking each department whether the individual courses were offered in AY 2012-2013. We also asked each department to identify new sustainability course offerings (or ones we may have missed in AY 2011-2012). In some cases departments referred us to course websites; in others departmental staff provided the information requested. Using this new data, we eliminated courses that were not offered this year. We also evaluated new courses based the UCI definition of sustainability in the curriculum and added new sustainability-focused and -related courses to the list. For the total number of courses offered at UCI, we realized that the number UCI provided last year only accounted for courses offered in Fall of 2011. This year, the UCI Office of Institutional Research (OIR) compiled the total number of unique classes offered in AY 2012-13. OIR used data from Spring 2010 as a proxy for Spring 2013 as they did not have the data for Spring 2013 in their system. We specified that unique classes meant not counting a course twice even if UCI offered it annually. Furthermore, the courses had to be offered, not simply listed in the course catalogue. To elucidate: if Introduction to Anthropology was offered in fall and spring, we counted it only once. Two other methodological changes occurred, which had an impact on our sustainability-focused and -related numbers. First, OIR counted cross-listed courses as separate courses due to their observation that cross-listed courses are sometimes offered by only one department. For example, the department of Anthropology may offer a class one year that previously was cross-listed for Anthropology and Political Science. In addition, OIR counted courses that had letters following them as separate courses. For example, EES190 A & B were counted separately. Given this change, we recalculated the number of sustainability offerings, counting the cross-listed classes and grouped classes as separate courses. These two changes augmented our number of sustainability offerings slightly.