University of Pennsylvania
ER-14: Incentives for Developing Sustainability Courses

The Integrating Sustainability Across the Curriculum program (ISAC) is an 8-week summer program teaming undergraduates with faculty to refine an existing course or develop a new course that incorporates sustainability as an academic theme. Faculty participants explore sustainability concepts at a one-day workshop in the late spring, and then are partnered with an undergraduate student research assistant to work over the summer integrating sustainability into the course syllabi, lectures, assignments, reading material, and tests. The research assistants work 40 hours a week for eight weeks starting in June, and are paid by funds made available by the Academics Subcommittee of Penn’s Environmental Sustainability Advisory Committee.

Faculty members that participate in the Integrating Sustainability Across the Curriculum program are paired with a student research assistant for eight weeks. The collaboration between faculty members and students is one of the strongest features of this program. Each student research assistant is paired with two faculty members and works with them to enrich their existing courses or develop new ones. This may involve, but is not limited to, researching material for the course, developing new assignments, and compiling course reading lists. Structuring the program to have one student work with two faculty members allows for cross-pollination of ideas between two separate courses and expands the breadth of knowledge the student is exposed to during the program.

In addition, courses that have participated in the ISAC program are highlighted in Penn’s "Sustainability Course Inventory," a directory of sustainability-focused and sustainability-related courses across Penn’s 12 schools and centers. The promotion of this course inventory fosters dialogue among students and underscores the inherently interdisciplinary aspects of sustainability across Penn’s diverse course offerings.