Sustainability Courses
Dickinson Offers Courses in Sustainability Across the Curriculum
Interested in sustainability but don’t know what courses to take? Dickinson offers 40 to 50 courses each semester that will help you gain knowledge about sustainability concepts, problems and solutions while building competencies and dispositions for creating a sustainable world. These courses are integrated throughout the Dickinson curriculum. You will find them in environmental and Earth sciences, Japanese and English literature, international studies and international business & management, physics and biology, economics and psychology, anthropology and sociology, plus many more.
Sustainability is the capacity to improve the human condition equitably
in this and future generations while conserving environmental systems
necessary to support healthy and vibrant societies. There are social,
cultural, economic and environmental dimensions to meeting present and
future needs that are strongly interdependent. Dickinson offers numerous
courses in arts and humanities, social sciences and laboratory sciences
that explore the different dimensions of sustainability from a variety
of perspectives. The courses vary in the degree to which sustainability
is a focus of study and are classified into two categories accordingly.
Sustainability courses can be identified by looking for the course designation Sustainability Investigations (SINV) or Sustainability Connections (SCON) when conducting an online course search in Banner. Faculty nominate these courses each semester using our Sustainability Course Designation process. These two categories of courses differ in the degree to which sustainability is a focus.
Sustainability Investigations: Sustainability Investigations (SINV) courses engage students in deep and focused study of problems of sustainability as a major emphasis of the course. They may focus on a selected dimension of sustainability, but do so in context with and reference to the three major dimensions of sustainability: social (including cultural), economic and environmental. Many of these courses use sustainability or sustainable development as an explicit lens through which to examine questions about society, economic and human development, science and technology, or human interactions with the environment. But courses that use other paradigms may also be considered to be Sustainability Investigations courses if they examine social, economic, and environmental dimensions of questions about meeting human needs in a world of finite resources and complex, interconnected systems.
Sustainability Connections: Sustainability Connections (SCON) courses engage students in making connections between the main topic of the course and sustainability by using assignments, selected readings, problems, examples, case studies, or a unit to explore questions within the broader context of the course about human interactions with the environment and their consequences for social, economic or environmental objectives. Often the explorations draw on knowledge and perspectives from more than one discipline, but can be rooted in a single discipline. Sustainability Connections courses may focus on all or just one of the dimensions of sustainability social, economic or environmental but with reference to at least one of the other dimensions. Sustainability is a significant but generally not a major emphasis of Sustainability Connections courses.
Learn more about Sustainability Courses at Dickinson College:
This is needed for the Baird Fellow Application. You may also include courses not on this list, with justification.