Curriculum Design with Interdisciplinary Learning Goals for Environment and Sustainability
Maybe you already participate in an established curriculum for environment and sustainability, and you're curious about adding new areas of depth to your curriculum? Or perhaps you want to design a brand-new curriculum to reflect interdisciplinary strengths? This workshop will focus on how to accomplish interdisciplinary skills (STEM, Humanities, policy, etc.) within a curriculum, and how to write learning goals to reflect this 'heavy lift' for interdisciplinary competence. Using principles of 'backwards design' - starting with the end goals of the curriculum, and aligning the intermediate steps towards those goals - participants will develop practical frameworks for creating integrated learning experiences that address environmental challenges across subject areas. Through collaborative work, you will:
- Identify connections between disciplines that support environmental literacy.
- Navigate common challenges in implementing interdisciplinary curriculum within existing school structures.
- Identify your institution's unique strengths in environment and sustainability education, and how to effectively leverage these.
- Help students understand your institutional context in a way that is helpful for students in their own articulation of their strengths, and areas which students might want to explore further, for example, through study abroad or internships.
- Reflect with peers on how institutional contexts vary widely, from universities with entire colleges dedicated to natural resources to those with limited faculty in environmental fields.
Intended Audience
Faculty at the college level who can participate in curriculum design at their institution. Especially relevant for faculty at colleges with "General Education" or distribution requirements, this workshop will emphasize how to align interdisciplinary goals with existing General Education categories. The intention and purpose of General Education are usually aligned with these same goals of interdisciplinary competence; this can be maximized, in curricula that are focused on interdisciplinary skills development for environment and sustainability.
Goals
By the end of this workshop, participants will have:
- Identified meaningful and achievable interdisciplinary goals for their institutional context.
- Developed strategies to leverage existing resources towards these goals.
- Identified realistic limitations and challenges, as well as strategies for dealing with limitations, within their particular context.
- Articulated next steps to propose changes within an existing curriculum, or to propose a new curricular approach.