University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

The material below is assembled for assessment purposes only as part of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s submission to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS).
Sustainability is defined as the commitment to make decisions today that benefit our quality of life without compromising the long-term health of communities and citizens, biodiversity, climate, and food and water systems. Sustainability addresses needs and growth that weigh how environmentally sound, socially just, and economically viable a practice or process develops and is implemented.
Within the above definition, sustainability rests upon two key assumptions:
1. Nature's capacity to deal with anthropogenic forces has limitations which must be embraced.
2. We as individuals, campuses, and local communities are not isolated, but rather, interconnected with local, national, and global human activity across social, economic, and environmental boundaries.

Sustainability Focused and Related Courses
To guide sustainability course identification, sustainability-related and sustainability-focused courses are defined as:

Sustainability-focused courses meet the general criteria and must either:

• Focus explicitly on sustainability as an integrated concept, including all three characteristics (environmentally sound, socially just, economically viable)

• Discipline-specific courses that focus explicitly on examining issues or topics using sustainability as a lens.

Courses should contribute to a students’ understanding of sustainability as an integrated concept and present them with knowledge, work, and challenges in order to analyze specific topics from all three characteristics.

Sustainability-related courses meet the general criteria and are consistent with at least one of these approaches:

• Discipline-specific courses which focus significantly on the intersection of at least two characteristics of sustainability;

• Focus principally on one dimension of sustainability but explicitly and regularly relate this characteristic to the other characteristics;

• Focus a significant sub-theme, major course assignment, significant project, or service-learning experience connected to the concept of addressing sustainability challenges.

UW-Milwaukee used several methods to complete the course inventory. A definition of sustainability as well as sustainability-related and sustainability-focused courses was agreed upon by an ad-hoc group of faculty and staff. The UWM Office of Assessment and Institutional Research provided a list of possible course offerings for FY2013, which Sustainability Office staff then went through and added all Special Topics Courses and syllabi where possible, determined whether courses were offered, and assessed whether the course would count to the total number of classes (no independent classification courses included). In addition, surveys were sent to department chairs and students to seek recommendations for sustainability-related courses. Finally, Sustainability Office staff went through each department course listing to determine inclusion (based on course summary and syllabi where possible).