At my university, the two most difficult tasks in filling out STARS were the course definition and the research definition. By difficult I mean rancorous, upsetting, and potentially show-stopping because of faculty opposition to the idea of defining and assessing their work.

In that situation, the AASHE STARS examples were a lifesaver (in the literal sense of a flotation device). We used the definitions almost verbatim. I can't imagine starting from scratch. When our faculty were asked for a definition of sustainability for a general education reform effort, they produced a 3-page rubric that they later expanded. We used the rubric in our assessment, but only to parse "focused" vs "related".

We were able to get agreement that the AASHE definitions were a reasonable starting point, which allowed us to move the debate to topics that were more important in gaining acceptance of a first definition: limitations on use (for STARS only, with posting as required by AASHE), avoiding mission creep (they would not be used for marking courses in the catalog, or for rewarding/punishing faculty), and pressure to conform (respecting faculty control of the curriculum).

Overall, I would say the suggested definitions were a brilliant way to help universities take the first step to defining courses and research with minimal campus politics. Maybe the next generation STARS should consider points for moving along an evolutionary path, from a simple definition/rubric to more complex.

Julian,

You have no idea just how timely this is for us at UW-Milwaukee. We are engaging in this later this week actually. In reviewing the course inclusions of some universities, I easily see the danger is a loose definition or interpretation. We would like to error on the conservative side when it comes to course inclusions, but will be seriously docked points for this. When course descriptions are not included, I am left to doubt that Africology and Judaism 101 are sustainability courses...

We need a way to develop meaningful metrics. I understand where Michael is coming from. Perhaps standardizing the definition as AASHE does, might be the only way to do that.

Thank you for the thought provoking article!

Kate

Interesting post Julian.

Chatham struggled with this a bit, because we have incorporated sustainability principles in so many of our classes across so many different programs and disciplines that it was hard to tease out - what is focused, what is related? With sustainability as one of the three core missions of our university, it is usually addressed in every class, just as there is usually something about women in every class, no matter what the name or discipline.

But how much? How often? We eventually settled on a simple metric for the gray areas that are of concern. If we took sustainability out of the course altogether, could it still be taught or would it become meaningless? This simple question made the process clear.

The larger question then is, do we accept the Technical Manual definitions? We feel that is rather the entire point of a technical manual - to make sure that we are all using the same standard. Standardizing definitions is an essential component of any rating system, and no rating system will work without them, so any clarification should incorporate that.

Mary Whitney
University Sustainability Coordinator
Chatham University

STARS gave us credit under degree programs for having an environmental studies degree. The criteria were very loose, and we weren't expected to do a deep analysis of their curriculum. If we had, we might have been able to discuss their weak areas, e.g. economics. Quite a few other points in STARS are based on presence/absence of a program, facility, etc. Maybe a similar approach should be applied to part of the STARS course credits -- automatic points for having courses in the most common core subjects (e.g. general/intro courses in ecology, economics, sociology, etc.).

On my campus I sensed there was an assumption that every course with environment in the title would be included, as would most on social issues. But I did not sense any assumptions about what would be included for economics/finance/business. We surprised some professors by including them as sustainability-related (our assessment was based on syllabi). I would count that as one of the larger benefits from the exercise. One of the ironies is that business courses probably have the most "tradition" of discussing sustainability/resiliency/survival as an organizational concept, even if it is often limited to the economic dimension.

We don't measure the success of a recycling program by counting the number of recycling bins on campus, we measure it by the recycling rate. Measuring outcomes is also a normal way of assessing student learning, so why does STARS ask institutions to count the number of courses offered? It's not the number of courses that's important, it's how well we prepare our students to be change-agents for sustainability.

The intro paragraph to the Curriculum category says that colleges and universities should "prepare students to understand and address sustainability challenges" and "equip their students to lead society to a sustainable future." I agree completely and think we need to get much better with measuring our ability to do that.

The Sustainability Literacy Assessment is a good first step, though, current assessment efforts (including my own at UMD) focus too much on assessing content knowledge and not enough on assessing core competencies (change agency, systems thinking, etc.). We really just have a Sustainability Knowledge Assessment now.

We need to develop a true Sustainability Literacy Assessment and use that to evaluate what our students actually know and understand about leading a transition to sustainability through their personal and professional pursuits. Let's stop counting inputs and focus on the outcomes we care to see.

Thanks Mark! I agree that we should be focusing on measuring outputs (student knowledge) rather than inputs (courses). That is why we included a sustainability literacy credit in STARS, despite the very small number of institutions that were doing it when we created the credit. I think STARS has helped convince more and more schools to take that step, which is great. Over time, as the campus sustainability community's experience and confidence in the measurements increases, I would anticipate shifting more and more weight to the literacy assessment instead of course counts.

However, since very few institutions are doing well-designed pre and post assessment of sustainability literacy at present., I'm not sure it would be wise to completely move away from course counts. They are undoubtedly an imperfect indicator, but I think they still tell us something meaningful about an institution attempts (if not effectiveness) to educate for sustainability. Courses are after all a major way in which campuses seek to educate about anything so, in absence of better data, it seems reasonable to believe that courses generally (though not always) to lead to increased sustainability literacy.

I am hoping that AASHE will take more of a leadership role in accelerating the development of robust sustainability literacy assessment tools, but I still think it is important to figure out how best to identify courses in the meantime.

Great discussion! Thanks for bringing this up, Julian.

I agree that one reason for assessing the availability of sustainability-related and -focused courses on a campus is to position the measurable output of that institution's resolve (towards teaching for sustainability-thinking) in the larger context of academia. I think this has merit, as does measuring sustainability literacy. I think we can and should do both. They do, after all, operate at different scales.

This is interesting though because it speaks to the part of ESD that we rarely illustrate, usually for political reasons: ESD is necessarily about thinking differently (holistically). Thinking differently from, in many cases, even the people teaching the content. It's an epistemological and ontological point about how to observe problematics. Relationships matter.

I love Mary's yardstick of meaningfulness. Off the top of my head, we might reference back to the three-legged stool metaphor of equity, environment, and economy. The stool illustrates relationships (well, if human race is to sit somewhere...).

For any given topic (e.g. trees), the course content would have to integrate two of the three legs to be considered 'related', and all three to be considered 'focused'. For example, teaching about trees only in the context of the environment might be considered teaching about a topic, not a relationship (e.g. Trees 101). Introducing one or more legs of the stool, by definition, identifies a relationship ("Trees 201: Trees in the Economy"; "Trees 301: Trees and Society").

On the other hand, if the instructor is teaching about concepts such as panarchy and resilience within a single topic, then I think they are teaching the very foundations of sustainability science, so, exceptions based on content could easily be justifiable, and lessens the rigidity of the model I described above.

Of course, some might argue that an instructor should be versed in either theories of sustainability science or ethics in sustainability, if he or she is to be considered teaching sustainability at all... However, I believe that teaching topics in the context of relationships will facilitate the sort of holistic thinking that ESD aims for.