Exploring:

How Might We Integrate Sustainability Across the Curriculum; across the CSU East Bay campus in collaboration with peers in a fun and constructive Faculty Learning Community

Vetting concepts, approaches, and pedagogy, discovering opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, multi-disciplinary conversations on topics, such as connections between social justice and sustainability, campus land use, sustainability programs on campus, and using the campus as a living lab.

Participants:

Lonny J Avi Brooks, Communication

Dr. Craig Derksen, Philosophy

Ian Pollock, Art (FIR)

Sharon Radcliff, Library

Surendra Sarnikar, Business

Michael Schmeltz, Health Sciences

Jason A. Smith, Health Sciences

Purpose:

To provide a place to:

• Discuss the implications of the IPCC 2018 report on our lives and the lives of our students.
• Explore how sustainable development and sustainable adaptation are shaping our disciplinary knowledge.
• Incorporate design thinking practices to build sustainability into our curricula.
• Explore how we might incorporate high impact educational practices in sustainability education across our campus and the campus as a living lab.

Oucomes

• We worked on a game that was a generative conversation tool for sustainability assignments to be published online.
• Prepared a report on progress for the final FLC Symposium and participated in preparations for the symposium and report
• We played a prototype version of the game at the final FLC Symposium
• We started on writing a joint paper on our game prototype

In our discussions about integrating Sustainability Across the Curriculum we settled early on building an interactive experience that could be used with students which developed into the challenge of building a game that could be played across colleges, disciplines with faculty and students. In response to the challenge we developed a board game to teach sustainability across various disciplines. A beta version was met with success at the concluding event with some faculty were so engaged that they continue to talk about the ideas proposed during the game for 15 to 20 minutes afterwards. Some colleagues have indicated that they plan to continue improving the game and adapt for use in their courses. We also started a plan and an outline for an article on gamifying sustainability curriculum across disciplines.

Members of the FLC gained a deeper appreciation of sustainability through our conversations across disciplines. They expressed enthusiasm about the interactions that came about when information science, health science, business, philosophy, art and design came together to talk about a particular topic. Faculty highlighted the discovery of new ways of incorporating multi disciplinary problem solving approaches into courses, the use of games as a teaching tool and the discovery of games as a meta-discipline. As a result participating faculty suggested they would trying to add more games in the curriculum in general and exploring more diverse approaches and resources for teaching sustainability to use in their classes. They also highlighted the benefit of exploring different perspectives from other disciplines.

Some faculty expressed and interest in further developing the game into an online version to use with students and use the existing successful game prototype. Together we plan to develop the game further and share it with other faculty as an open source project. Participants of the FLC agreed that a future FLC could be used to continue to build this game while working with a slightly tighter timeline and test the game with students.

Participants of the FLC felt that they got to know faculty from other colleges and others pointed out that it also helped to introduce them to people across the campus that they I would normally not interact with. They also noted the benefit of having a diverse approach to FLC's, not just in the constitution but also in the approach. Having the opportunity to create physical prototypes as well as author a joint paper. All of us felt that 20 hrs seemed perfect since less time they we would not get as much done, yet more would cut into job time too much.

Overall the members of this FLC felt grateful for this universities approach to FLC and I thought that it is one of the initiatives that are truly faculty centered. They noted that while FLC certainly add to faculty workload, it also created a space for faculty to socialize and exchange ideas to create broader interdisciplinary awareness of how to prepare students for the world. We noted that developing and playing the game was both educational and actually really fun! Most agreed that a second iteration of this FLC would be a great idea and left with the feeling that the resulting game was worthwhile project with great potential applications to the classroom and beyond.