Faculty Learning Community

Infuse sustainability principles into academic curricula

The Center for Teaching and Learning offers UGA faculty and post-doctoral scholars the opportunity for cohort-based instructional development through its Faculty Learning Community (FLC) program. Faculty Learning Communities are designed to build community and enhance scholarly teaching and learning. Several FLCs explore methods and resources that can lead to effective student engagement toward sustainability. The Sustainability Across Curricula FLC functions as a cross-disciplinary working group.

Sustainability Across the Curricula FLC

In order to move towards a healthy, equitable society while maintaining Earth's basic systems, we as educators must reach across disciplinary divides and infuse sustainability principles into every discipline, teaching our students to approach problems holistically and to integrate social, economic, and environmental concerns as they apply knowledge learned to the grand challenges of our time. The Sustainability Across Curricula FLC will focus on a new topic every academic year.

Goals:

  1. Explore sustainability education through our many disciplines and contribute to on-going scholarship in this area.
  2. Share ideas, resources, and practical ways to incorporate sustainability into the curriculum.
  3. Provide an interdisciplinary forum to foster conversation and collaboration to address grand challenges in the curriculum.
  4. Identify ways to locally address the topic through our curriculum and engage our students through experiential learning.

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Topics

The current COVID 19 crisis challenges the sustainability and resilience of many of our current systems, from food, to energy, to city design. The Sustainability Faculty Learning Community will function as a working group exploring how this global crisis dares us to re-envision our future with a focus on the 17 UN Global Goals developed in 2015 to end poverty, fight inequality, and stop climate change. Particular focus will be given to developing curricula that engages students in these topics as one of the grand challenges of our time. Faculty will explore how their courses and research intersect with sustainability and resilience in the aftermath of COVID 19.

This year the FLC will focus on UN Global Goal Number 2—Zero Hunger—exploring food sustainability in various forms. In addition to the UN Global Goal website and targets, we will use the book Project Drawdown, and network with the UN Regional Center for Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development Greater Atlanta. Faculty will explore how their courses and research intersects with Global Goal 2 and how individual disciplines can contribute.

The FLC will focus on frameworks of resilience from both global and local perspecitives. Faculty will discuss strategies to incorporate principles of resilience into various disciplines and develop a resilience module to enhance interdisciplinary teaching and learning at UGA.
Leadership in sustainability research, education and service is a “hallmark” of The University of Georgia’s 2020 Strategic Plan. Strategic Direction VII states that “sustainability should be infused into formal and informal educational opportunities throughout the university.” This FLC is designed to take up this challenge. It quite simply will function as a working group on sustainability in the curriculum. We will discuss readings, create and share assignments, bounce ideas off of one another, bring in other sustainability scholars and professionals, and try various classroom tools. The discussions will range from the theoretical to the practical, from the basics of sustainability to examples of effective sustainability curriculum.