AASHE has given many curriculum workshops that have trained 350 of faculty who teach tens of thousands of students, but we still have the sense that there is very much still to be done. One thing we've talked about at AASHE for some time now is "how do we scale up?" How do we do that in a way that is respectful of the way faculty develop and advance? A little over a year ago, several of us were talking about the fact that no one organization that woudl be able to facilitate this. With Second Nature/ACUPCC support,  AASHE convened a Curriculum Summit at San Diego State that brought together representatives from a whole host of organizations and faculty. The goal of the Summit was to answer that sense of urgency and need to scale up. That two day meeting was very intense. A lot of small group work. As a result of all the note taking and transcribing, AASHE produced the document Sustainability Curriculum in Higher Education: A Call to Action.

Facilitators:

• Geoff Chase, Provost at UC San Diego and AASHE Board Chair
• Paul Rowland, AASHE Executive Director

Chase:  AASHE has given many curriculum workshops that have trained 350 of teachers who teach tens of thousands of students, but we still have the sense that there is very much still to be done. One thing we've talked about at AASHE for some time now is "how do we scale up?" How do we do that in a way that is respectful of the way faculty develop and advance? A little over a year ago, several of us were talking about the fact that no one organization that woudl be able to facilitate this. With Second Nature and AASHE, we convened a Curriculum Summit at San Diego State that brought together representatives from a whole host of organizations and faculty. The goal of the Summit was to answer that sense of urgency and need to scale up. That two day meeting was very intense. A lot of small group work. As a result of all the note taking and transcribing, AASHE produced the document Sustainability Curriculum in Higher Education: A Call to Action.

Rowland:  What hit was that inspite of the dozen curriculum workshops AASHE had led, there was still a lot of ramping up that needed to be done.  We realized we didn't need to reach a few thousand faculty.  Not tens of thousands.  But hundreds of thousands.  We need probably a quarter million teachers teaching in a way they weren't teaching a decade ago.  It's a huge scale.  That's been a driving question for me since I became Executive Director.  Especially, how to do that in a way that respects the diversity of institutions we work with.  Their goals and visions are very different.  At the same time that it respects that, we have to say "millions of students are leaving our institutions every year without an understanding of sustainability."

One of the challenges coming out of the Summit was how to pull together all the ideas that came out.  First, I want to point out the section in the Call to Action that addresses the question "Who is this call addressed to?"  Then, there are some overarching observations, then there is a list of critical actions and recommendations for who needs to take them.  There are recommendations for institutions, and for NGOs and for government and foundations.  Finally, the document concluds with Next Steps. 

So, that's the call in a nut shell. Where does it go from here?  We've already started working on a number of things that we'll talk about.  What we really want to know is your reaction to the things in this document and how you feel about implementing them.

Open floor for comments and questions...

Comment:  It's not clear to me the rationale for the emphasis on regional implementation.

Chase:  People are looking to reduce travel.  And, we are trying to decentralize the task.  Another reason is the importance of place.  And there are already some regional consortia forming that we think make sense.  It also allows for the diversity of institutions to be better expressed vs having a one model.

Rowland:  Is it more efficient to have a centralized approach or a decentralized approach?  If you have a centralized office that tries to do things nationally, the efficiency of reaching everybody is low.  The tension of course is that if the regional centers are duplicating each others efforts that is inefficient.  So, we want to network the centers.

Comment:  We did a lot of discussion about what we meant by region at the Summit.  It's a fluid thing.  For many of us it is about face-to-face, so the ability to know people working in your area in a deeper way.  It is just about getting together a critical mass.

Question: The question of how to convert the recommendations into concrete steps is the key.  Do you have any recommendation on that?

Rowland:  I think the regional one is going to be the most difficult.  Also we are going to need funding.  We are working on looking for that.

Chase:  It strikes me that the Call may not address opportunities for partnership with business and industry.  The opportunities for internships and service-based learning programs.  There's an industry partnership in San Diego that's interested in taht kind of thing.

Comment:  I work in work-force development.  Work-force development is mentioned in one of the first pages of the Call but then not mentioned anywhere else.  If you are looking for business partners, the Renewable Energy Council would like to help.

Comment:  We can look at the opportunity to form these regional centers as an opportunity to reach out to regional partners that are already going.  National Ecological Observation Network (NEON) and Kaufman ecosystem network are two I have in mind.  We should look to work from them and learn from them.

Comment:  I'd like to talk about the Fellows recommendation.  There should be two levels.  One that gives a senior recognition award which can motivate people with very little money ($500).  Others that are more fully funded.

Comment:  Regional is important but there are also alliances that transcend geographic boundaries that can be brought together online and at gatherings like this.

Chase:  Yes, good point.  The suggestion isn't that the regional focus would exclude the continued national efforts like this.

Comment:  At the San Diego meeting we were told not to get into a debate about what sustainability means because it would take up the whole two days.  I do think, however, that the document suffers somewhat by being everything to everybody.  I'm very big on graduates having basic climate and energy literacy and the word climate only appears once in this document.  We need to focus more specifically on the learning outcomes we want.  At the Summit, I mentioned that the National Science Foundation is funding a dozen climate initiatives in higher education.  Half are regional and half are thematic.  Might be a good model.

Chase:  Learning outcomes is absolutely critical.  The Summit wasn't about that.  It was about the big picture structure/framework we need to change teaching.

Rowland:  One of the recommendations that did come out at the Summit.  I think it is true is that we do not have clarity on what we are talking about and so sometimes we talk past each other.  There is a need for a rich and large conversation in the academic community about what we mean by sustainability.  We need to do both.  We need to form the collaborative to work on curriculum change and have that conversation.

Question?  Are you already moving ahead with that collaborative?

Rowland:  We are working on scoping that out between now and December.

Comment:  I work with ACM.  We've been focusing on introductory classes and the classes that most faculty teach most of the time.  We should also think about producing little green books of 10 or so articles that could go into an intro to Economics class or an intro to American History class.

Comment:  I work in non-credit continuing education extension type of program.  We have lots of sustainability types of courses.  I'm wondering if that portion of higher education is being heard and receiving focus.  We are doing a lot on sustainability because we can be a little more nimble with less regulation on what we can do.  Maybe we can play a role.

Chase:  Yes.  Non-credit education, workforce education, all of these are equally important in this.  Absolutely, the SDSU center sees it that way.  We don't want to privilege one part of the curriculum over another.

Comment:  Are there organizations out there so that we can reach faculty through their own disciplines?  The American Chemical Society or others?

Chase:  I'd like to invite Deb Rowe to speak to that.

Debra Rowe:  The Disciplinary Associations Network for Sustainability was created 5 years ago.  We just got a FIPSE grant.  We should have a national initiative around teaching centers around each of these disciplinary associations.  We should have a national initiative around sustainability in workforce development.  If you are doing something good, name it national initiative and have fellows of those initiatives.  We have to look for ways to share.  I'm in desperate need of a wiki where people can post curriculum, learning outcomes, and share.  Is AASHE going to do that and when?

Chase:  I think the fellows point you raised was heard at the Summit and is in here because of that. AASHE is moving towards curriculum and I'll let Paul talk about that.

Rowland:  As you know, AASHE was focused more on the operations side for a long time.  As it grew, we got IT managers, we got STARS managers, but we never got a curriculum manager.  So, when I came on I said, okay, that's my job.  But, I don't have the time to do it all.  We built into our budget funds to hire consultants to come in and help us sort out our curriculum initiatives.  We did and RFP and eventually hired the Center for Teaching and Learning at San Diego State University.  Now, I'll invite them up here to talk about what they are doing for us...

Brock Allen:  I want to tell you a story.  It starts with you at this lunch.  "Wash your hands before eating."  It's a simple logical now practiced by billions of people, but was rejected when suggested by Dr. Semmelweiss in 1847 for doctors delivering babies.  It wasn't accepted until Pasteur arrived with the germ theory.    How many of us are waiting for the theory and principles to advance the acceptance of sustainability education?

Let's go to 2017 when AASHE has built a hybrid content management system (CMS) that is both database and wiki.  They have tapped the world wide cognitive surplus to get faculty to contribute massive amounts of data for teaching sustainability.  Cognitive Surplus is what drives Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, Twitter.  

Let's imagine a teacher teaching Natural Civilization and Natural Systems introductory level course that was initially developed by principles of sustainability shared in the AASHE curriculum CMS.  A few years later, the teacher finds in the AASHE curriculum CMS more detailed exercises and specific examples she needs to make the learning outcomes deeper.  But today, she is worried about student engagement in an insect survey field exercise.  Last year's effort nearly fell apart as students fatigued, got bored and were uncomfortable with working with gross insects.  She refines the learning outcomes this year to include appreciation for the labor involved in science and courage.  She searches CMS for biology, lab/field studies.  The CMS produces a long list of theory, principles, learning outcomes and labs that she reviews.  She is able to go from there to the related forum postings.

Let me hasten to add that this sytem exists 7 years in the future.  The CMS I've described is a ship.  It depends on the contribution of cognitive surplus to the AASHE Curriculum CMS by faculty.  I want to invite you to participate in the ship we are building.

Rowland:  What's going to happen over the next few months is we will be working on a framework that uses a principles based approach that will then be used to build the wiki or database.  One of my greatest fears is building things for people to come and people don't come.  A lot of you probably had the experience of the Second Nature syllabus database that didn't get used enough.  We want to make sure that what we build answers the questions that people are asking and frame it so it is usable for both input and output.

The following comments were added by Paul Rowland after the end of the session:

AASHE is currently working on several steps to enact some of the action items noted in the Call to Action.  Our contractors will be developing a framework and business plan for us to develop and implement an AASHEE's Faculty Fellows Program.  They are also creating a framework for us to use for developing a curriculum collaborative.  Centra lto what Brock was discussing is the development of a wiki/database that will provide a structure and incentives for both  potential authors and potential users as well as opportunities to create communities of practice.  We should have our report on how we might do these things by the end of December at which time we will sort through the options to determine most cost effective approach to meeting the needs of the AASHE membership.  Much like AASHE made haste slowly in developing STARS to make sure it was useful to the community we will do likewise with the development of a curriculum tool that will have long-lasting value to facultly.