Assessing sustainability curriculum: from transmissive to transformative approaches

This paper aims to describe a two-stage sustainability curriculum assessment, providing tools and strategies for other faculty to use in implementing their own sustainability assessments.

In the first stage of the five-year curriculum assessment, the authors used an anonymous survey of sustainability faculty and requested data that would verify the survey’s self-reporting: updated sustainability syllabi, and answers to the question, “where have you integrated the three aspects of sustainability – biological systems, social systems, economic systems – into this course?” Finding that the self-reporting results did not match the evidence on the syllabi, the authors interrogated their methods from the faculty workshop trainings for sustainability curriculum transformation.

The authors’ workshops had not provided clear definitions for “sustainability” and the learning outcomes expected in sustainability courses. They had also not addressed the role of transformative pedagogy in teaching a holistic approach to sustainability. The research identified and transcended five key barriers to implementing sustainability curriculum: an over-reliance on faculty volunteers, unclear and unenforced expectations about sustainability implementations, a failure to recognize and circumvent institutional and philosophical barriers to teaching sustainability’s interdisciplinary approach through disciplinary-based curriculum, conceiving of sustainability pedagogy as transmission rather than transformation, and overlooking the ecology of educational systems as nested within the larger sociopolitical environment.

This study confirms the limitations of faculty self-reporting unless augmented with verifiable data.

Sustainability educators can use this research to devise curriculum or program assessment on their campuses: the mixed-methods approach to data collection, the inquiry into sustainability workshop trainings, the elements required on sustainability syllabi for building a coherent sustainability studies program, the resources for practicing a transformative sustainability pedagogy, and the barriers to sustainability implementation along with strategies for surmounting these barriers will all be of use.

This paper explores and combats root causes for an all-too-common disconnection between positive faculty self-assessment and syllabi that do not fully integrate sustainability across the disciplines.