“The magnitude of the challenges we face demands that all people have a basic understanding” of climate, the plan says. “Higher education must promote a learning agenda… with interdisciplinary educational offerings.”
In a Global Survey 2022Sixty percent of higher education institutions said climate-related content is in less than 10% of their courses. But a vanguard of colleges and universities is looking to change that. Each of these diverse institutions has its own unique method and mission. They are all embracing the strategy of integrating sustainability content across the curriculum as much as possible. They are breaking down silos and traditional disciplines and ensuring that these courses are covered by as many students as possible.
Toddi Steelman, Former Stanback Dean of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, he was a member of This Is Planet Ed, a higher education program from the Aspen Institute Working Group. Duke presented a broad spectrum climate commitment in 2022 covering operations, research grants and partnerships, including with the New York Climate Change Exchange.
But “education is our superpower,” Steelman said. “We want every student who majors in climate to be a climate major. Our responsibility is to make sure that we train our students to be able to address these challenges and identify solutions. Whatever they do — preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, policymakers — if they have some training in climate and sustainability, they will take that training to their first job and the next.”
Accordingly, each of the university’s ten schools is working to define for itself what it means to be aligned with what Duke calls a “fluency framework”. The framework covers skills, behaviours and attitudes that underpin understanding of climate and sustainability.
Allowing each school to find its own way, rather than imposing a change in climate content by fiat, will take time. Steelman advocates for fluency for all college students by 2028, she said, but “we’re working through a committee process and we’ll see what works.”
The hope is that this process, which honors faculty expertise, will result in greater ownership and more meaningful integration of climate content. Steelman says the nursing and medical schools have been at the forefront, along with, interestingly, the French department.
“They are introducing issues related to climate change into conversational French,” she said. “They are also thinking about investigating how verbs are conjugated. The way we talk and think about the future has consequences for climate change.”
SUNY Syracuse’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry was Ranked number one in the nation (along with two other schools) for its sustainability curriculum in 2023. So it is perhaps surprising that it does not have a single course that focuses exclusively on climate change. At least not yet.
“We don’t necessarily teach specifically about climate change, at least at the introductory level,” said Stephen Shaw, chair of the Environmental Resources Engineering department.
“We definitely teach the fundamentals that allow people to understand the science behind this and what it means to adapt and mitigate climate change,” she added. Students can even work with a professor to directly build instruments that measure greenhouse gases in the field.
According to Shaw, faculty are now discussing the possibility of adding an introductory interdisciplinary course that would answer questions like, “What is the basic science? What are the impacts? What are the impacts to people? What are the impacts to habitat, recreation, in general?”
Dickinson, a liberal arts college of just over 2,000 students in Pennsylvania’s coal country, mandated in 2019 that all students take at least one sustainability course as a graduation requirement. In practice, Neil Leary said, Dickinson Associate Provost and Director of the Center for Education for Sustainability“More than 50% of students who graduated last May had taken four or more such courses, and one in four had taken more than six.”
Dickinson offers more than 100 sustainability courses per semester, in departments ranging from business to architecture. Of particular interest are the college’s “Mosaic” courses, offered once or twice a year. They are taught by faculty from different disciplines and often include an independent study and a travel component. In a recent offering, on the energy transition in Germany, students studied representations of the environment in German literature and culture, and also traveled to Germany to see the adoption of solar power and energy efficiency in practice.
Like Duke with its fluidity framework, Dickinson follows a broad definition of sustainability, Leary says. He cites the Global Council for Science and the Environment, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to promoting Environmental and sustainability education and researchwhich has identified five key competencies in the field: systemic thinking, forward-looking thinking, collaborative skills, strategic thinking and values-based thinking.
“This is not a value-neutral education,” Leary said. “Sustainability has a set of values that includes taking into account the needs of all people.”
For now, institutions embracing sustainability are few enough to serve as a selling point in the competition for students, faculty and donors. Leary says 40 percent of college students recently surveyed by Dickinson agreed that it was a major factor in drawing them to college.
But if industry leaders have their way, a fully sustainable curriculum will go from being a luxury to a sure bet. Bryan Alexander, author of Universities on Fire and an educational futurist with a particular focus on climate change, said: “My motto is: climate change is the new liberal arts.”
