University of Saskatchewan
AC-2: Learning Outcomes

Institution Level Sustainability Learning Outcomes:

Proposed Institutional Sustainability Competencies and Learning Outcomes
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In February 2022, the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness (GMCTE) released Sustainability in Teaching and Learning, its report on the proposed new institutional sustainability competencies and learning outcomes. The report posits that for our students to be the sustainability leaders the world needs, we will need to do more than just expose them to concepts around sustainability issues. With a toolkit of theoretical frameworks, technical abilities, and critical perspectives, our students will understand the urgency of action for the 5Ps and have the skills they need to facilitate solutions with diverse stakeholders.

The proposed institutional competencies are as follows:

1. Communicating Meaningfully
USask students engage in meaningful communication about sustainability when they exchange ideas, facts, and perspectives about sustainability with others. They are effective when they purposefully select and use strategies for communicating in response to context and audience, making dialogue about sustainability more inclusive and persuasive, and more likely to result in sustainable actions.

2. Engaging in our intercultural society
Students who thrive as members of a sustainable society handle diversity in perspective, position, and approach adeptly. They communicate and collaborate effectively within diverse groups and an increasingly global society and have intercultural competence to generate and achieve solutions that generate inclusive, sustainable development.

3. Nurturing Successful Relationships
Students who nurture successful relationships describe who they are and can embrace diversity of interpersonal strengths and weaknesses to support sustainable outcomes with others. They are accountable for their own sustainability actions, manage the conflicts inherent in sustainability effectively, successfully prioritize with other sustainability stakeholders, and negotiate for sustainable results.

4. Leveraging Technology
Students who can leverage technology are able to use digital/technological tools and systems ethically, appropriately, and effectively to accomplish sustainable goals.

5. Adaptive Design and Problem Solving
Students who can successfully employ adaptive design and solve problems in sustainability need to be creative thinkers who see interdisciplinary possibilities where others may not. They can use their own disciplinary expertise to contribute to the design, implementation, and evaluation of an interdisciplinary approach to achieve a sustainability goal. They can work in interdisciplinary contexts to achieve complex, collective goals.

6. Cultivating Resilience
Students effectively engage in cultivating resilience when they reflect on what they are doing, how it is working, and make appropriate adjustments to be successful. They engage in thoughtful decisionmaking and are self-aware and reflective. Students can purposefully navigate adversity and respond appropriately to the negative impacts of unstainable activities and climate change. Students respect personal limits and boundaries, and they deliberately engage in healthy persistence in the face of change, including our changing world.

The report also recommends the adoption of course- and program-level outcomes and lays out an action plan to achieve its recommendations, which includes:

1. Aligned Systems
It is foundational that the various USask structures which contribute to sustainability are aligned to achieve our cross-functional institutional goals and objectives. This happens across the breadth of programs and is scaffolded to help students progressively develop the behaviours of sustainability over the duration of their program.

2. Curriculum and Educational Development
Curriculum and educational development are essential areas for action because they helps ensure educators understand how to design learning experiences that will lead to the sustainability competencies and that they are built in individual courses and whole programs, even those that are not overtly focused on sustainability.

3. Sustainability Teaching Fellows
Faculty fellows help establish culture and practice in their academic units over a specific timeframe. These fellows are selected based on their demonstrated ability to contribute to change, disciplinary and teaching expertise, and willingness to support conversations with peers.

4. Responsive innovation
Sustainability problems, including changing educational practices to make it likely that most students develop sustainability competencies, require iterative design process. The responsive innovation actions are focused on responding to gaps through intentional and ongoing design, including data collection and revision.

Division Level Sustainability Learning Outcomes:

School of Environment and Sustainability: 96 Graduates
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Graduates from the School of Environment and Sustainability:

Think holistically with ethical intent
- Apply critical and creative thinking to sustainability problems
- Transcend disciplinary boundaries to achieve harmonious integration of human and natural systems
- Identify and assess how human and natural systems work and interact

Deeply understand sustainability
- Explain and understand the origins and multiple dimensions of sustainability
- Think across and within systems
- Develop a fulsome vocabulary to demonstrate a deep understanding of sustainability
- Understand how complexity and uncertainty affect the sustainability of socio-ecological systems
Integrate a range of perspectives and ways of knowing:
- Demonstrate and encourage respect for a range of perspectives and ways of knowing
- Are able to articulate the benefits and limitations of a range of perspectives and ways of knowing
- Are profoundly aware of their own position, its strengths, limitations, and assumptions

Are ambassadors for sustainability and agents of change:
- Mobilize theory into practice to solve problems
- Ask bold/difficult/challenging questions
- Are courageous, tenacious risk-takers in the face of change
- Can perceive practical solutions and new insights to sustainability challenges

Have research expertise:
- Can work effectively in interdisciplinary, inter-cultural and/or cross-sectoral teams
- Understand the process of research
- Know how to design and execute effective interdisciplinary research
- Can synthesize, integrate, analyze and evaluate data for the purpose of creating new knowledge
- Know how to conduct research ethically

Demonstrate collaborative, leadership and professional skills in knowledge sharing:
- Can work effectively in interdisciplinary, intercultural and/or cross-sectoral teams
- Can plan and manage sustainability projects and research
- Can effectively manage self in the context of sustainability projects (e.g. setting realistic deadlines, being reliable, working effectively under uncertainty, solving problems, maintaining a positive attitude, modelling professional conduct)
- Can facilitate, mediate, translate, and communicate knowledge to appropriate audiences in many different forms

Have a substantive area of expertise in keeping with their program of study:
- Demonstrate excellence within their chosen field of study
- Can create, analyze, synthesize and communicate within their field(s) of study

The list of sustainability-focused courses from USask's 2022 Sustainability Course Inventory was used to identify the degree programs requiring sustainability-focused courses. Graduates across 2020, 2021, and 2022 convocation years were summed in USask's UView reporting structure to show the total number of graduates, and the total graduates from the above-mentioned degrees requiring sustainability-focused courses was lifted from within that report.

The degree programs identified as requiring sustainability-focused courses in the sustainability course inventory are as follows:

General Agriculture
Animal Bioscience
Animal Science
Anthropology
Archaeology
Agricultural and Resource Economics
Kanawayihetaytan Askiy
Biology
Civil Engineering
Chemical Engineering
Chemistry
Community Hlth and Epidemiol
Commerce
Educational Administration
Economics
Educational Foundations
English
Environmental Engineering
Environment and Sustainability
Educational Technology & Design
Environmental Science
Food and Bioproduct Science
Finance
General Engineering
Geological Engineering
Geography
Geology
History
Health Studies
Indigenous Studies
Interdisciplinary Studies
International Studies
Johnson Shoyama School of Graduate Studies
Kinesiology
Law
Linguistics
Master Business Administration
Mechanical Engineering
Master Professional Accounting
Northern Resource Economics and Policy
Nursing
Nutrition
Pharmacy
Physics
Planning
Plant Science
Political Studies
Psychology
Public Health
Religious Studies
Renewable Resource Management
Soil Science
Sociology
Toxicology
Large Animal Clinical Sciences
Womens and Gender Studies