NCSE Recommendations from A New Generation of Sustainabilty Leadership

At the January 2010 NCSE Conference a breakout session was held that yielded the following recommendations to NCSE.  What are your thoughts about these recommendations and how do we go about implementing them?

BREAKOUT SESSION RECOMMENDATION TEMPLATE

Breakout Number: 03

Breakout Session: A New Generation of Sustainability Leadership: The Role of Higher Education in Building a Green Economy

Task 1. Universities as individual institutions and a collective sector should adopt a comprehensive strategy and holistic approach to sustainability leadership development (including metrics that assess impact

Task 2. The higher education community should define what it means to be a sustainability literate graduate

Task 3. Funding agencies and higher education institutions should institute procedures to provide incentives and rewards for faculty that encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and research (e.g. funding, tenure and promotion requirements, awards, connecting research areas with institutional practices, removing risk from trying new concepts) that include sustainability literacy impact metrics

Task 4. Faculty and staff should be mentors of sustainability leadership by modeling best practices and innovation in their actions (e.g. create multi-level leadership opportunities, give advice, provide resources, giving recognition, reaching across class, race, cultural barriers, etc.)

Task 5. Accreditation bodies should include sustainability literacy and practices in their evaluation criteria

Task 6. All higher education institutions should adopt STARS as a mechanism for measuring tangible progress

Task 7. Researchers, government agencies, NGOs, think tanks, etc. should forecast jobs that will be part of a new green economy and linking them to educational programs, and identify current successful sustainability-literate professionals and determine the skills and knowledge that has made them successful to feed back into educational institutions

Task 8. Faculty should receive pedogogy training

Task 9. K-12 teachers should be enabled to teach sustainability literacy at the K-12 level
Funding agencies and professional organizations should help to establish models for communicating sustainability effectively to create cultural transformation

Task 10. Higher education institutions should make sustainability a part of their cultural identity, modeling and prototype sustainability best practices, value systems, measurement (impacts, effectiveness) as living laboratories.