Sustainability Across the Curriculum":Stoies and Strategies for change

On Wednesday the 24th, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture at UC Davis, which was part of their annual Design Lecture Series, which focuses on incorporating different speakers who’s concentration is design. The lecture, entitled “ Sustainability Across the Curriculum: Stories and Strategies for change” is one of the very first lectures for the 2009-2010 school year. This week Geoffrey Chase, professor at San Diego State University, came and spoke to us about the topic of Sustainability and how it is being incorporated into curriculum to both enhance the minds of college students, and provide effective ways to evoke sustainable habits in every day activities. Through stories, and collective data results, Geoffrey helped us to better understand the importance of the sustainable movement in curriculum. Since Sustainability is quickly becoming a priority on everyone’s mind, especially in the design field, it was extremely helpful, and interesting to hear how schools are taking valuable information and incorporating it into their curriculum to make everyone aware of how they can be apart of the efforts. Having been apart of Ponderosa Project at Northern Arizona University, Geoffrey was a leader in helping faculty from all areas incorporate the idea of sustainability into their curriculum. The Project was an experiment which consisted of twenty different faculty from different areas. Their task was to see how they could incorporate the idea of sustainability into their everyday teachings. It was exciting to hear the results that people were able to include ideas that were centered around the subject, which matched the professor’s original subject matter. Chase also provided useful information about how to make the knowledge of sustainability effective on all campuses. Enforcing that sustainability is local and global, transformative, involves relationships and the community, and that it’s made up of different types of systems, are all useful ways of getting the point across to students. With direct distinctions such as listed above, Chase pointed out that it is entirely possible to tie sustainability in with individual curriculum. It literally relates to every subject. It was all useful information that I hope continues to be heard on campuses nation wide. Sustainability is the future. We all have to start somewhere…

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