Find Out How One Liberal Arts College is Increasing Climate Literacy Across the Liberal Arts Curriculum

Gustavus Adolphus College, a liberal arts college in St. Peter, MN is bringing faculty across disciplines together to embed climate literacy in classrooms throughout the liberal arts curriculum in an effort to increase climate science literacy among the College's students and faculty.

Gathering for small workshops or 'teaching circles,' faculty are exploring climate science and the relevance of climate change to disciplines as varied as English, Economics, Health Exercise Science, Religion, Anthropology, and Scandinavian Studies. The teaching circles provide faculty specific areas of intersection between climate and their course content and provide feedback about potentially useful dimensions of climate science.

By working closely with climate science faculty members, non-geoscientist faculty are utilizing InTeGrate*-based modules that introduce key climate science concepts (CSCs) for courses in which climate science is not a main course topic, but for which the consequences and implications of climate change are important. Faculty are incorporating climate-related content in courses outside the geosciences in innovative and creative ways:

• English Course: British Literature I
  Module: Climate in England During the Little Ice Age
• Economics Course: Introduction to Macroeconomics
  Module: The Economics of Climate Change: Tragedy of the Commons
• Health Exercise Science Course: Personal Fitness
  Module: Climate Change and Consequences: Exercise in a Warmer World
• Religion Course: Faith, Religion & Culture
  Module: Scientific Certainty and Climate Change
• Sociology/Anthropology Course: Nomadic Pastoralism
  Module: Climate Change and the Lives of African Nomads
• Scandinavian Studies Course: Nordic Cultures
  Module: Climate Change and the Arctic

By collaborating across disciplines, faculty at Gustavus Adolphus College are increasing the Earth literacy of all undergraduate students and preparing more graduates who will bring an interdisciplinary understanding of Earth processes to bear on the environmental issues confronting our society today and in the future.

*Interdisciplinary Teaching about Earth for a Sustainable Future (InTeGrate), a 5-year STEP Center grant from the National Science Foundation, seeks to increase Earth literacy of all undergraduate students, as well as the number of graduates who are prepared to bring an understanding of the Earth to bear on the resource and environmental issues faced by our society today and in the future. For more information on InTeGrate, please see our website at http://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/index.htm