We have created a core of three courses to provide students with a broad and thorough understanding of Environmental Sustainability Education. All three of these courses are requirements for the 5-course minor, but any student is welcome to enroll in any of the courses on it’s own.
ELE/ESE 100 Environmental Sustainability in Education: An Introduction This course provides an introduction to environmental sustainability in education. This course provides an overview of environmental sustainability in multiple disciplines (science, social science, humanities, arts), environmental sustainability in schools, and the interconnectedness of sustainability efforts across disciplines and fields. The format will include lecture, discussion, debate, small group work, local field trips, and student presentations.
ELE/ESE 220 Sustainability and Society This 4-credit course addresses key issues in sustainability. Students will examine the various factors that impact the world’s ability to build a sustainable future from multiple perspectives including the social sciences, humanities, and arts. Policies and practices on local, national, and global scales from the past to the present will be analyzed to help develop an understanding of best practices for building a sustainable future. Students will consider these topics through the lens of teachers and consider ways that the content can be effectively integrated into pre K-12 curricula. The format will include lecture, discussion, debate, small group work, local field trips, and student presentations.
MST 203 Environmental Science for Educators Examines key ideas in environmental science including human impacts on the environment, natural resource management and preservation, and environmental ethics. Course will take a blended learning format and will include: online lectures and simulations, hands-on demonstrations, and a field visit to a local recycling facility. Strategies for designing K-8 lessons and curricula aligned to these key ideas will also be discussed, and the culminating project will be a 3-lesson mini-unit designed to teach an environmental science topic to elementary and middle school students.
