Marcia Shofner
Incorporating Sustainability into classroom curricula
2009-2010
I will include teaching about sustainability in each of the course I teach this academic year. This Fall I will teach a course for incoming transfer students BSCI 297B “Strategies for Success in Chemical and Life Sciences” and a course for undergraduate teaching assistants within our College, BSCI27P “Undergraduate Teaching Fellows Professional Development Seminar”. In the Spring, I teach an introductory lecture for majors of around 350 students, BSCI106 “Principles of Bioogy II; Ecology and Evolution.
BSCI 279B: This is a course taught to incoming transfer students (similar to our freshman UNIV100). Transfer students are dealing with many issues coming to the University of Maryland. Besides learning how to deal successfully with the changes and challenges of majoring in CLFS programs, I want to get them thinking about the issues of sustainability. Two key “Big Ideas” I will incorporate in our discussion are Systems Thinking and Interconnectedness and Interdependence. Because our courses within BSCI are working to integrate and interconnect across curricula and even disciplines, we try to expose our transfer students to this (often new) concept in our class. We will do this within the context of sustainability including our campus initiatives.
BSCI279P: This course is a new program just being developed for our cadre of new UTAs- Teaching Fellows. We are working out the syllabus now, but I want to introduce the idea and practice of sustainability into our discussions with both our graduates and undergraduates who will be teaching our lower level biology labs and discussion sections. I would like to get our TAs thinking about sustainability as they are teaching and explaining biological concepts. A goal in this goal is to teach what sustainability is and how it is important. Then I want the UTAs to think creatively about how they can bring up the issue of sustainability and any of the “Big Ideas” while they are interacting with their students. Thus, we will spend one class talking about the “Big Ideas” and what sustainability means. Included in this discussion will be brainstorming about how they can teach sustainability no matter what class they are assigned/
BSCI106: I have two goals for this class in the spring. One is to interweave throughout the curriculum examples and discussions of the Chesapeake Bay- its organisms, its challenges and work being done to conserve the Bay. I will most strongly make these ties during my Ecology unit, but will begin bringing up the Chesapeake Bay from the first day of class. I want the students to realize what a treasure the Bay is (license plates!) and appreciate the natural resource that is right at their doorstep as they live in Maryland and attend UMCP. Part of the reason for this is how many blank looks I saw as I spoke about Bay organisms and concerns like the nutria for one example last spring while I was teaching. After a show of hands about the Bay showed most students to be either not interested or not informed, I decided next time I teach that I wanted this to change. This goal will be an attempt to shine a light on Bay issues. A second goal is to introduce the concept of sustainability on the first day and then continue to come back to those issues throughout the curriculum. Of course this will be much easier to include in the ecology unit as we talk about many of the “Big Ideas” like renewable and non-renewable resources, ecosystems and biodiversity and global warming, to name a few. The “Big Ideas” lend themselves to ecological contexts. I teach human population growth and carrying capacity, as well, but I want students to see the Triple Bottom Line in all our topics. I want them to think about environmental stewardship as they calculate their footprints. In the large class, I want to encourage group discussions about sustainability and how they can be responsible members of the human race. Then I would like to have them think about ways they can integrate what we have been talking about in the course to UMD’s campus initiatives on sustainability.