University of Oregon
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

The Sustainability Fellows program encourages faculty to increase community-engaged learning around sustainability in existing or new courses. Each year, a cohort of faculty from across the institution receive a stipend for participating in a multi-day workshop that introduces them to pedagogy of sustainability and community-engaged learning and connects them to potential partners from the local community. Faculty receive a second stipend after submitting syllabi and other evidence of having altered or created a course or other learning opportunity that integrates meaningful, community-engaged learning around sustainability. Quarterly gatherings with the current cohort of faculty, as well as previous cohorts, increase the networking and engagement around pedagogy, sustainability, and community-engaged learning. Faculty can apply for additional funding to support implementation of their learning objectives related to the program.

In the past three years, the program has funded and supported the work of 27 faculty in disciplines that range from Planning, Public Policy, and Management to Landscape Architecture, Psychology, International Studies, Philosophy, and of course Environmental Studies, among others. One faculty spanned two classes to gather and analyze data related to parking needs (or not) in the city to make the case to local government for less parking and more sustainable transportation infrastructure. Two other faculty, in collaboration, worked with a local transitional housing community serving the local un-housed population to design modular, sustainable, and revenue generating infrastructure onsite. A third example is a professor in Education who deepened her teaching around the importance of food for effective education, framing it as a social justice issue in a first-in-the-nation course.

Professional development, networking, financial stipends, financial project support.