Redesign Sustainability

By Broadside Staff Reporter Edwin Mora

A few George Mason University professors presented their sustainability influenced curriculum in an effort to push for a sustainability studies minor and encourage other professors to make their courses greener.

At an event on Feb. 20 in SUB I Room A, professors from the College of Humanities and Social Science and College of Science talked about teaching courses influenced by or directly devoted to environmental consciousness. The event was sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence.

The professors’ skills to integrate sustainability into their curriculum were taught through the Sustainability Across Curriculum workshop sponsored by a few university departments. They include the Office of the Provost, Center for Teaching Excellence and University Life, among others.

“There are various ways we can green George Mason,” said Susie Crate, an environmental science and policy assistant professor. “There is a need to green our curriculum in order to green the way our students are thinking.”

According to Crate, sustainability is a term that has evolved from being a description of only an environmental issue to a “three-legged stool” that includes environmental, cultural, social and economic issues.

Two of the five professors, Crate and Andrew Wingfield, a New Century College assistant professor, are leading a faculty initiative to encourage professors from all of the Mason colleges to teach sustainability.

The faculty initiative is pushing for a minor in sustainability studies. The idea has been proposed to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Science. If approved, the minor would be housed in the New Century College and at the Environmental Science and Policy Department.

Wingfield said that the minor will require one 200-level class that would be titled “Global Sustainability and You,” three electives and a 400-level capstone course that would be called Sustainability in Action.

“It will be offered to any undergraduate, regardless of their major,” Wingfield said. “Students will be able to apply sustainability to their discipline.”

The minor is still a work in progress. It has to be approved by the deans in the college of humanities and social sciences and the college of science.

“We’re in a time of environmental crisis,” Wingfield said. “It requires a paradigm shift in our culture to make changes, and the university is where we can start.”

Crate and Wingfield included sustainability in their curriculum through the special topic courses in NCC and environmental science and policy. The course is called Fostering Sustainability in the 21st century, which combines the two special topic courses into one six credit class.

He explains that in society, everything can be critiqued from a sustainability standpoint. Students “use the principle of sustainability to look at the way our society is organized and critique it,” Wingfield said.

The remaining three professors include Laurlyn Harmon, an associate professor in parks, recreation and leisure studies, Dr. Melanie Szulczewski, a term assistant professor in NCC, and Lynne Constantine, associate chair of art and visual technology.

Harmon contextualized sustainability into her human behaviors in natural environments course.

According to Harmon, in this course students will develop conceptual understandings, theoretical foundations, global awareness, community perspective and impact of sustainability.

“Students will be able to adapt sustainability into human tourism and human behavior,” Harmon said.

Szulczewski redesigned her energy and environment course by adding a sustainability aspect.

“I took the course and revamped it,” Szulczewski said.

Students in Szulczewski’s course will now deal with environmental impacts and individual responsibility when using energy. Originally, the course only dealt with the use of energy and effects on the environment.

Constantine not only incorporated sustainability into an existing course titled Art As Social Action, but also designed a course solely devoted to sustainability. In addition, she designed a one-credit course, The Sustainability Project, to go with it.

“The courses deal with sustainability through design,” Constantine said. One of the projects in the art and social action class requires that students make sustainability interesting through visual design. The one-credit sustainability project requires a project that will integrate art and sustainability.

The Sustainability Across Curriculum workshop started in January 2007 and it is in danger of losing sponsorship after only being conducted for the second time this past January.

The five professors mentioned were previously trained by the workshop on how to run sustainability classes at Mason.