While lessons related to climate and sustainability are probably most often found in environmental science courses, some colleges and state systems have been encouraging their faculty to weave these topics across their curricula, from history, to psychology to social justice.
Although the current political climate has cast a chill over subjects like global warming — and funding cutbacks potentially loom — college leaders mostly say their faculty are not showing signs of hesitancy in thinking creatively about integrating environmental topics, usually through altering existing curricula rather than adding new modules to already busy syllabi.
This article comes from the current issue of the Community College Journal, which has a focus on green programs.
Such efforts began in the 1990s but became more common in the mid-2000s, and anecdotally they seem to be continuing to grow, says Julian Dautremont, director of programs at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).
In addition to job-focused programs that might lead a community college to offer sustainable agriculture, solar and wind technician, or electric-vehicle-focused curricula, “There’s a movement to try to ensure that all students are getting some basic background in sustainability,” he says. “That’s where the effort to spread this across the curriculum [comes from], a recognition that all disciplines have a role to play in advancing sustainability, and that it’s relevant to the career paths in many different fields, rather than a few distinct ones.”
In a math class, sustainability challenges might inform the questions, for example looking at how the exponential growth of a population impacts the landscape, Dautremont says. A history class could explore how the environment has changed over time. An English professor could use sustainability-related prompts when making a composition assignment.
“Each professor is going to do it differently, depending on the structure of the course. It’s hard to give universal guidance because they’re all doing it in different ways,” he says.
Workshop focused
AASHE’s model typically revolves around providing an annual workshop in which faculty from a wide range of disciplines engage in open-ended conversations, hear from guest speakers and have space to think through how sustainability might relate to their respective course topics — without being told how to do so, Dautremont says.
“Sometimes, workshops can facilitate the sharing of information across disciplines, and maybe team-taught classes can come out of that,” he says. “There’s typically a stipend involved — not a lot, but it might be something worth their while, and you get it when you submit revised syllabi based on conversations from the workshop.”
Such workshops also address a key challenge that faculty face: the time required to develop new content and figure out how to integrate it rather than tacking it on, Dautremont says.
“There’s an emphasis on experiential education or problem-solving learning as tools that can be effective,” he says, and trying to make the content real for the students.
AASHE has partnered with a couple dozen colleges and universities around the world to create Centers for Sustainability Across the Curriculum, which host at least annual workshops for their own faculty and those of other schools, Dautremont says.
Climate solutions in Washington State
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges received $1.5 million in state funding three years ago to create the Climate Solutions Program and has gotten $475,000 to keep it going in 2025. In addition to integrating climate justice education throughout curricula, the program has upgraded coursework to meet the needs of the “green workforce” and undertaken initiatives to make colleges themselves more sustainable, says Irene Shaver, climate solutions program coordinator.
Over the past three years, the Climate Solutions Program has developed more than 500 climate-focused assignments and green workforce modules for students, trained 43 faculty leads from 21 community and technical colleges — who, in turn, have facilitated workshops for 228 additional faculty — and seen 10 colleges institutionalize the model and offer annual opportunities for faculty, she says.
The climate justice across the curriculum model was developed by faculty at Bellevue College and North Seattle College, and the broader program came about due to requests from a group of college presidents, vice presidents of instruction and faculty members, Shaver says. “It’s very much across disciplines,” she says. “It’s in STEM, psychology, arts and humanities — and also professional technical degree programs like welding and automotive programs.” The state board has run a couple of curriculum workshops in which it paid faculty to present their climate education models, “teacher-to-teacher webinars, where people could grab-and-go with the curriculum,” she adds.
Professors have, for example, assigned students to create a handmade zine around a climate justice issue for an English class, covered climate anxiety and how to mitigate it by taking action in a psychology course, and presented ocean acidification — often thought of as a chemistry-related issue — in a social justice-related course that examined how this phenomenon impacts the shellfish harvest of the local Lummi Tribe.
“What drives engagement for students is stories about human impacts,” Shaver says. “It’s part of the region they’re in, it’s impacting a community, and then you can look at ramifications on business, environmental indicators of health, and how the tribe is responding, and how that’s tied to their treaty rights.”
Shaver has conducted focus groups with students of color who told her that these sorts of integrations were the first time a faculty member had ever related science to things they had seen in their own communities and lives. “It was so much easier to learn about chemistry when it was embedded into issues they cared about,” she says.
Faculty are sometimes hesitant because they’re concerned about teaching topics like climate justice that may be outside of their discipline, Shaver adds, but those concerns have eased with time, tools, models and training, as well as a piloted curriculum.
“They start with one module, and then they deepen the practice,” she says.
‘Greening Your Curriculum’ in suburban Chicago
McHenry County College in Crystal Lake, Illinois, an outer suburb of Chicago, infuses green education throughout its curricula through the campus Sustainability Center, which also works to create a green campus and to encourage a green community, according to Kim Hankins, manager of sustainability.
The Sustainability Center has undertaken several “Greening Your Curriculum” projects to provide faculty with a variety of resources from sustainability education organizations, while giving students the opportunity to attend two conferences this past spring through grant funding, Hankins says, adding that she speaks with multiple classes each semester.
The center also has conducted a faculty survey that asked if their courses had one or more sustainability principles embedded within them, she says. That survey turned up more than 80 courses with units, assignments or lectures with materials related to the environment, equity, economy or all three, ranging from art, to sociology, to philosophy.
Faculty integrate sustainability in a way that’s embedded rather than “bolted on,” says Kate Kramer, Earth science department chair and Earth science and geology instructor. “Whether it’s geology, literature or political science, they’re showing how sustainability connects to core course concepts.”
