Sustainability Site Guide

Browse 80 activities including in-class assignments, service learning projects, writing assignments and field trips.

See over 40 college-level course descriptions and syllabi for courses such as sustainability studies, campus sustainability, sustainable energy and more.

Teaching Materials, Including Activities, Visualizations, and Courses

Teaching About Energy - Presents resources for getting started or improving teaching about traditional and alternative energy sources along with activities and courses addressing energy. Includes a rich selection of visualizations on energy sources and generation of energy.
Carbon Footprint Collection - This collection contains carbon footprint exercises appropriate for introductory level students via ready-made footprint calculators, or left as open-ended calculations in upper level courses.
Teaching Climate Change - Presents activities, courses, and resources pertaining to teaching climate change including information on teaching about Ice Cores and Paleoclimate. This collection also includes an extensive list of web based resources for teaching climate change.
Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) - The CLEAN project, a part of the National Science Digital Library, provides a comprehensive collection of climate science and climate literacy resources for students in grades 6-16 and informal citizen learners. The overarching goal of the CLEAN Pathway project is to introduce standards-aligned "civic science" materials to promote responsible energy use and planetary stewardship for a sustainable future.
Teaching Public Policy in the Earth Sciences- Presents information and activities on incorporating public policy issues into science courses. Includes an extensive list of web resources and several examples of role playing scenarios that are useful for teaching about public policy.
Developing Student Understanding of Complex Systems - This collection begins with a detailed explanation of the characteristics of a complex system which include many interdependent variables, feedback loops, chaotic behavior, etc. The collection also presents pedagogical strategies, activities, and course descriptions, essays and much more about addressing complex systems.
EarthLabs - This extensive collection is designed to assist educators in teaching how the earth system functions through five Earth Science units; Corals, Cryosphere, Drought, Fisheries, and Hurricanes. Earthlabs contains rationale for teaching with an Earth System approach, goals and objectives for each of the five units, and several lab or hands-on activities for each unit.
Teaching Energy with Quantitative Skills- This resource contains a collection of activities using quantitative skills to teach about energy. Many energy concepts are quantitative, such as rates of consumption and production, the costs of energy and comparisons of energy usage. Using a quantitative approach is an effective way to cut through political or emotional responses to energy topics.
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Approaches to Teaching Sustainability

InTeGrate: Interdisciplinary Teaching of Geoscience for a Sustainable Future - This is a community effort to improve geoscience literacy and build a workforce that is prepared to tackle societal issues. This 5 year project is a NSF STEP center grant and will run from 2012 through 2016, with many pathways for faculty involvement and collaboration.
Teaching Environmental Issues and the Affective Domain - This web page offers some strategies to teach environmental topics, particularly controversial ones, without coming up against affective barriers to learning. The page also offers a collection of examples, teaching methods that work well with teaching about controversial environmental issues, and a list of related links and resources for further information.

Using an Earth System Approach - The Earth System Approach acknowledges that changes in the solid earth can impact the atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, or hydrosphere. This resource presents information on how and why to create an earth system course.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching - Many aspects of sustainability are interdisciplinary. This resource provides a step-by-step guide of how to make your course interdisciplinary, ideas for assessment, and examples of types of courses that lend themselves to being interdisciplinary.

Service Learning - In service learning, students couple classroom learning with a community based partner through a project. This helps students understand the broader impacts of issues and the applications of classroom learning while building community relations.

Experience-Based Environmental Projects - Experience-based environmental learning presents an opportunity to learn through one's own lifestyle and actions. Students apply classroom topics to realize that although issues may be global or regional, they ultimately have roots at the individual level. An example is the lifestyle project.

Campus Based Learning- This module explains how educators can use the campus grounds to link theoretical learning with a local physical example. This helps students see how the sustainability concepts they are learning affect them directly. Examples are presented on how to use the campus in small and large scales.
Structured Academic Controversy - This cooperative learning strategy ties together multifaceted issues with a sociological perspective wherein small teams of students learn about a controversial issue from multiple perspectives.

Teaching Urban Students - Students from urban backgrounds have different connections to the land than students from rural backgrounds. Making sustainability issues more meaningful for urban students means using urban students' vast understanding of the urban environment as a backdrop for introducing ideas about the natural world.
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Articles on Teaching Sustainability

Science Education and Civic Engagement: International Journal - Articles on teaching sustainability in science, math, and teacher preparation courses. Articles include best approaches to integrate sustainability, the outcome of using service learning practices on student learning, and more.
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Course Design:

Course Design - The purpose of this resource is to help faculty design or redesign courses. There is a tutorial that guides educators through the process of course design helping educators set course goals, choose assessments and activities, and create a syllabus. This resource would be particularly useful for designing a new course addressing sustainability or modifiying an existing course description for use in your classroom.
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Resources from Workshops

Cows, Colleges, and Curriculum Project - This workshop focused on incorporating sustainability issues into courses at St. Olaf College and Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. A rich resource section exists on the workshop website along with courses and activities.

ACM, FaCE Project: Incorporating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum- This collaboration between several Midwest colleges intends to produce activities and courses that incorporate sustainability. Course and activity descriptions, a list of 'big ideas' in sustainability, and participant essays outlining sustainability at several Midwest colleges are presented.
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Related Site Guides

Energy Site Guide

Climate Change Site Guide