Infusing Sustainability into Graduate Level Higher Education and Student Affairs Coursework

College Student Development Theories

One session of a College Student Development Theories course often focuses on epistemological theories, such as King and Kitchener's Reflective Judgment Model (1999), which grapples with the nature of knowledge around large, uncertain issues and can be utilized to understand how students’ perceptions of such issues guide their thinking and behavior. One way to connect this theory to sustainability is to incorporate a discussion on climate change—a large and uncertain issue—and the ways in which people in each of the three stages of the model (prereflective thinking, quasi-reflective thinking, reflective thinking) might react to climate change. In this particular example, students placed statements such as, “climate change doesn't exist,” within the three stages of the theory. As a result of these small group conversations, one student shared that her mother, having seen it on Facebook, recently asked her what exactly climate change was. The student had to then translate “climate change” into her mother's native language to help her conceptualize its meaning. She shared this as an example of someone in prereflective thinking, since her mother had not yet been exposed to the concept of climate change. Other students discussed their personal experiences of adapting their behaviors, or on the other hand, observing friends and family who had demonstrated resistance to change (like still using plastic straws), despite awareness of more sustainable options. They also talked about how, based on their knowledge of how plastic straws harm wildlife, they might start a campaign to get their office to provide an alternative. Here, the example of personal experiences with climate change provided students with a tangible application of a core student development theory and specific examples of each stage of thinking (CAS, 2019). In course feedback, students noted that it was helpful to practice real-world application of theory within the classroom context. Such opportunities not only enriched their learning, but helped to connect theory to their lives beyond the classroom.

While an entire course on sustainability in higher education might be created, in this article, we provide examples of contextualizing or synthesizing courses where sustainability is a component of the class (through a lesson, case study, or skill practice) rather than its main focus.

Critical Issues in Education

The course Critical Issues in Education focuses on issues of equity and social justice, emphasizing both theories, such as neoliberalism and intersectionality, and the application of theory and research to practice for master's level students. For example, in one recent iteration of the course, the instructor chose to highlight racism, intersectionality, neoliberalism, and decolonization, before closing the semester with a week of discussing sustainability. During the final week, students were asked to draw connections between the previous weeks’ readings as they pondered the course's conclusion with a week on sustainability, and to then reflect on actions they could take in their assistantships or professional roles to create a more sustainable institution. Students drew various strong connections between sustainability and other equity issues in higher education. Several students focused on the importance of stewardship of land and resources as outlined in both their sustainability and decolonization readings, while others embedded sustainability in a broader ethos of collectivism in which the link between sustainability and decolonization was perceived. Other students took a different approach and used sustainability to extend critiques of neoliberalism. Still, other students connected sustainability to broader systems of injustice and inequity, noting that just as climate change overwhelmingly impacts communities that are poor, of color, and/or located in the Global South, so it also affects those communities’ access to local higher education and institutions. While students made broad connections to the social justice movements that they had been reflecting on throughout the class, they had a more difficult time theorizing practical steps to take, beyond the typical desires to conserve resources, such as energy, and to reduce environmental impact. Multiple students, never having considered sustainability as a part of higher education coursework, shared their newfound excitement at seeing sustainability addressed on the syllabus, and that they felt a new calling to think about sustainability in their practice.

In one recent iteration of the course, the instructor chose to highlight racism, intersectionality, neoliberalism, and decolonization, before closing the semester with a week discussing sustainability.

Organization and Administration of Higher Education

In courses on the organization and administration of higher education, students learn about the national structure of higher education in the United States, the organization and governance of institutions of higher education, and key administrative tasks of these institutions (e.g., finance, enrollment, and policy issues). One lesson might incorporate the role of academic curricula and how it exists within a broad academic plan for an institution, especially highlighting Lattuca and Stark's (2009) model of showcasing curricula within specific sociocultural contexts. To develop students’ understanding of the model alongside knowledge of sustainability, faculty could examine sustainability as a content area within a campus academic curricular plan. Course readings might include sections from Lattuca and Stark's (2009) Shaping the college curriculum: Academic plans in context, history sections of websites focused on the movement for sustainability in higher education curricula since the 1990s (such as the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education; AASHE, 2018a), and highlights from texts featuring the importance of disciplinary organization for higher education (e.g., Klein, 1990). As an out-of-class assignment, students could interview an instructor, student, staff member, or alumnus connected to an academic program (e.g., a major or minor) in sustainability, asking about the formation and placement of the program within their institution's disciplinary structure. The class could then consider the ways in which campus curricula have shifted over the last few decades to create whole academic programs related to a “new” discipline of sustainability (a concept and word whose current connotations date back to its 1987 usage) in light of changing scientific and sociological understandings of sustainability. In-class discussions could have students draw, again within Lattuca and Stark's model, each of its components that might have influenced the creation of sustainability programs.

As an out-of-class assignment, students could interview an instructor, student, staff member, or alumnus connected to an academic program (e.g., a major or minor) in sustainability, asking about the formation and placement of the program within their institution’s disciplinary structure.

Assessment and Evaluation

Courses on assessment and evaluation in higher education often feature ways that administrators assess specific programs. One module within such a class can review national assessments along with various methods of benchmarking, a particular tool being AASHE's Sustainability Tracking and Rating System (STARS; AASHE, 2018b). Readings to accompany a traditional text for this module would be a review of the STARS website, including its history and the data required for submissions. Since an important feature of the tool is that it requires holistic data from across divisions on campus, divisions not necessarily associated with one another, it provides an opportunity for rich discussion on who is responsible for assessment, why a campus might be motivated to report, and how an institution might organize a collection of data on such a large, cross-campus scale. In class, students could address questions such as why campuses need or want benchmarking tools, what indicators STARS uses to measure sustainability, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of those measures. Also included would be ways that campuses use tools like STARS either to improve (or to gather) holistic data from across the institution. Out-of-class projects could include students downloading publicly available data, creation of an assessment or research question, and rudimentary data analysis with STARS data to practice assessment skills.

Access, Diversity, and Racial Inequality in Higher Education

The environmental justice (EJ) movement emerged in the early 1980s as a grassroots social movement by people of color in the United States and has shed light on and challenged the disproportionate burden communities of color and indeed all low-income communities face with respect to pollution and other environmental health hazards (Bullard, 2000). Although largely excluded from higher education access discourse and scholarship, EJ issues connect to the work of student affairs (Wells, Buckley, & Kimmel, 2016) and broadly to education as pollution directly affects humans physiologically, emotionally, and cognitively (Lu, 2020) and indirectly affects humans by driving down home values (Currie, Davis, Greenstone, & Walker, 2013). Thus, a course on higher education access might assign readings on the connection between EJ, school appropriations, and K-12 educational outcomes to show the limitations of widely used higher education access theories. Course discussions might examine federal and state policies and laws related to environmental (in)justice, showing how they create and perpetuate educational inequities for students of color. Additionally, courses on diversity could address this underrepresentation and the resultant inequitable experiences of students of color in higher education. Students of color remain severely underrepresented in environmental disciplines (NSF/NCfES, 2011), and many environmental fields are actually among the most racially homogenous, predominantly white fields (Carnevale, Strohl, & Melton, 2011). Students in HESA courses might examine how these inequities are the result of the climate for racial/ethnic diversity (Garibay & Vincent, 2018) as communities of color have experienced a historical legacy of exclusion within the mainstream environmental movement (Bullard, 2000), and EJ concerns are not yet fully valued and incorporated into postsecondary environmental and sustainability curricula in the United States (Garibay, Ong, & Vincent, 2016; Garibay, Vincent, & Ong, 2020).

Higher Education and Student Affairs programs are fundamentally designed to prepare professionals who can educate and develop ethically responsive citizens, as well as facilitate postsecondary institutional environments under the same auspices.