University of Nebraska - Lincoln
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

Overview: Sustainability and resilience concepts infused into the UNL curriculum is a critical component of UNL’s Environment, Resilience, and Sustainability Master Plan that strives to develop a comprehensive “sustainability and resilience across the curriculum” program. To this end, the UNL Sustainability Initiative provided stipends for about 20 instructors during the 2019 -2020 academic year and the Spring 2021 semester. Instructor who participated wanted to infuse sustainability and resilience concepts into their courses. Infusion involved the use of pedagogical approaches that will benefit student learning while sustainability and resilience empowers students to think about systems and the use of spatial and temporal reasoning in their own decision making. By bringing together the challenges and solutions to living sustainably and creating resilient systems, teachers can readily connect students to important societal issues including human population, increased resource needs (food, energy, water, etc.), and human impacts on the environment.

Goals:

1. Increase sustainability and resilience literacy among UNL students.

2. Connect students and faculty to social issues at the local to international levels.

3. Create a community of faculty who have an improved knowledge and awareness of sustainability and resilience.

4. Create work, learning, and service environments that promotes as mindset that every student can reach their full potential.

Program Outcomes: The primary outcome of the program has been an activity, unit, or module that incorporates sustainability into a discipline-specific current course plan during the academic year following participation in the workshop. Another important outcome will be the expansion of a community of faculty who have knowledge and awareness of sustainability and resilience that can be shared with others.

Student Outcomes: One or more of the following student learning outcomes are integrated into a current course. Students will be able to: define sustainability and resilience; explain how sustainability relates to their discipline, their lives, and values; identify how their actions impact issues of DEI, sustainability and resilience; and utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.

What: Workshop participants use student-centered pedagogy to integrate sustainability and resilience concepts into curricular experiences. Participants add new material to a growing curricular portfolio that includes a range of disciplines including but not limited to: Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design; Political Science, Geography, French, Horticulture, Natural Resources, Engineering Management, Chemical Engineering, Natural Resources, and Philosophy.

Workshop Design: Participants use four monthly, two-hour workshops to create curricular materials. materials will be deployed academic year following participation in the workshop. At the end of the semester, the group will convene to present the outcomes from their activities. Products from these modules will be featured in Nebraska Today and archived in the Digital Commons and made available to the community through the Chancellor’s Environment, Sustainability, and Resilience Commission (CESRC). This workshop is part of the ongoing activities of the CESRC.

In 2019 to 2021 each instructor received a $1,500 stipend. In the spring 2021 workshop, instructors received $300 for completing the workshop.