Charting students’ exposure to promising practices of teaching about sustainability across the higher education curriculum

ABSTRACT

Although policymakers have advocated for infusing sustainability throughout the higher education curriculum, we know little about how to teach students this complex subject matter. Therefore, using data from a sustainability survey of Michigan State University undergraduate students, this study charted students’ exposure to promising practices of teaching about sustainability during the Fall 2017 academic semester. Results found that on average, students neither agreed nor disagreed that they experienced cognitively responsive teaching while learning about sustainability. Additionally, students experienced teaching for sustainability on average between a few times and sometimes, although closer to a few times. These results demonstrate that while promising practices of teaching and learning are being employed to teach students about sustainability to some extent, they ought to be occurring with greater frequency in order to have the necessary transformational impact on future generations.

KEYWORDS:

• sustainability
• sustainability pedagogy
• sustainability education
• teaching and learning
• cognitively responsive teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is worth noting here that the teaching for sustainability core ideas facet is different from Neumann’s (2014) first claim in her cognitively responsive teaching. Neumann’s subject matter claim contributes the idea that instructors introduce subject matter ideas. They teach these subject matter ideas well: in-depth, in different ways, in a logical order. However, Neumann does not specify what these subject matter core ideas are. On the contrary, the teaching for sustainability core ideas facet posits what the core ideas of the interdisciplinary field of EfS are but does not discuss how well they are taught, just that they are present. Furthermore, the teaching for sustainability core ideas facet builds off Neumann’s first claim that frames how EfS can be understood as an interdisciplinary field within a set of core ideas. As such, I use the teaching for sustainability core ideas facet to stipulate what these core ideas, in fact, are.

2 This study received Institutional Review Board approval from MSU and from the researcher’s home institution at the time of the study.

3 Michigan State University earned a silver Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS) rating (‘About MSU Sustainability,’ n.d.). MSU President Lou Anna Simon signed the We Are Still In letter declaring that the institution will continue to support climate action to meet the Paris Agreement (‘We Are Still In,’ n.d.). Furthermore, students are exposed to sustainability learning, as

on campus and around the globe, MSU students learn, explore, investigate, and increase their understanding of a range of environmental, social, and economic needs and issues – from clean water and food security to public policy, gender equality, and social justice. (‘Learn Sustainability Michigan State University,’ n.d.)

MSU has 15 environment-focused majors, specializations in environmental studies and sustainability, and a residential learning community that focuses on the study of the environment, as well as sustainability research opportunities, Study Abroad programs, student organizations, and university events and initiatives (‘Learn Sustainability Michigan State University,’ n.d.). As seen here, MSU is at the forefront in terms of integrating sustainability throughout the institution.

4 Prior to distributing the survey, items were reviewed by a panel of experts. Content experts in subject areas of higher education teaching and learning, EfS, and sustainability, assessed whether the items were suitable for measuring the students’ sustainability learning. Additionally, questionnaire experts assessed whether the items met content standards, cognitive standards, and usability standards (Groves et al. 2011). After incorporating feedback from the experts, the survey was pilot tested with students in a public institution in New York. I engaged with the think-aloud technique, in which I guided the participants in sharing thoughts and perceptions of each of the questions, which helped me understand if college students interpreted the questions the way I had intended them to. I also asked them about length, flow, clarity, and language of the survey (Groves et al. 2011). After incorporating feedback from the pilot test, I distributed this survey at MSU at the end of the Fall 2017 semester, in which I asked students to think about where they had the most opportunity to learn about sustainability, and respond to the pedagogies their instructors used in teaching them about sustainability in that particular course.

5 Biglan’s (1973) classification of academic domains describes disciplines as hard versus soft (disciplines with single paradigms versus multiplistic paradigms); pure versus applied (knowledge for discovery versus applied knowledge); and life versus non-life (concerning life systems).

6 Scales are a type of composite variable, which is made up of two or more variables that are highly related to one another (Song et al. 2013).