The Sustainability Seminar introduces Sustainability Certificate students to local and global sustainability issues, sustainability professionals, and strategies and approaches for addressing global challenges at a local scale. This includes developing students' competence in seven key areas: systems thinking competency, anticipatory competency, normative competency, strategic competency, collaboration competency, intrapersonal competency, and integrative problem-solving competency.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will show leadership in the seminar by co-leading course sessions, conducting outside activities or research in sustainability, or presenting their sustainability research.
Athena Title
Interdisciplinary Sustain Sem
Non-Traditional Format
The seminar provides an opportunity for students nearing completion of the certificate to present their work to their peers.
Prerequisite
Second year student standing
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall and spring
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will understand local and global sustainability issues, sustainability professionals, and strategies and approaches for addressing global challenges at a local scale. To achieve this, the seminar focuses on seven key Sustainability Competencies.
Students will recognize and understand relationships; to analyze complex systems, including their social, environmental, and economic components, to evaluate how systems are embedded within different domains and scales; and to deal with uncertainty when making decisions.
Students will understand and evaluate multiple futures-possible, probable and desirable; to create their own vision of the future; to apply the precautionary principle; to assess the consequences of action; to deal with risk and change.
Students will understand and reflect on the norms and values that underlie their actions; and to negotiate sustainability values, principles, goals, and targets, in a context of conflicts of interests and trade-offs, uncertain knowledge and contradictions. Students will also be able to reflect on their own role in the local community and global society; to continually evaluate one’s actions; and deal with one’s feelings and desires.
Students will collectively develop and implement innovative actions that further sustainability at the local level and further afield.
Students will motivate, enable, and facilitate collaborative processes for sustainability problem solving. This includes the ability to understand and respect the needs, perspectives and actions of others (empathy); to understand, relate to, and be sensitive to others (empathetic leadership); understand roles within a group, deal with conflicts, and maintain flexibility and adaptability in doing what is necessary / taking on roles to accomplish shared goals.
Students will understand how to regulate one’s own emotions, desires, thoughts and behaviors as well as one’s positionality and role in global society and local community. Acting with self-awareness and regulating, motivating, and continually evaluating one’s actions to improve oneself, drawing on and developing emotional intelligence and resilience.
Students will apply different problem-solving frameworks to complex sustainability problems and develop viable, inclusive, and equitable solutions that promote sustainable development, integrating the other competencies.
Topical Outline
Seminar are organized around the 7 key sustainability competencies and includes speakers and activities that facilitate students growth and development as sustainability professionals. Class sessions also highlight interdisciplinary knowledge and an understanding of the interconnectedness of sustainability challenges that
transcends academic disciplines.
