Across the Curriculum
Dickinson offers over 130 courses each academic year that help students gain knowledge about sustainability concepts, problems and solutions while building competencies and dispositions for creating a sustainable world. 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. Over time, these courses have been integrated throughout the Dickinson curriculum in over 39 academic departments. At Dickinon, it is required to take a sustainability course as part of the general degree requirements. However, we consistenly have about 85% of our graduates taking two or more courses and about 50% taking four or more courses during their on campus study.
Check out the sustainability courses data an enrollment that we have been monitoring for nearly 10 years on the Sustainability Dashboard.
Dickinson students can identify sustainability courses using the course designations Sustainability Investigations (SINV) or Sustainability Connections (SCON) when conducting an online course search. You can also see the breadth of the courses offered in our Online Course Search for Sustainability Courses.
Faculty designate these courses each semester using our Sustainability Course Designation process. These two categories of course designation differ in the degree to which sustainability is a focus.
Sustainability Course Assessment
Assessment of student learning outcomes associated with Dickinson’s sustainability graduation requirement is coordinated by the Center for Sustainability Education (CSE). Data for the assessment was collected in Spring 2023 and results of the assessment are were collected using four methodologies.
- Assessment of student learning by faculty for a sample of sustainability courses;
- Self-assessment by students of sustainability-related learning through the IDEA course evaluation system;
- A review of sustainability course assignments and syllabi; and
- A survey of students’ sustainability knowledge.
The assessment shows clearly that a high percentage of students gain abilities in Dickinson’s sustainability courses to think critically about sustainability in its multiple dimensions, including environmental, social, and economic. 81.4% of 502 students whose assignments were assessed by faculty demonstrated satisfactory or exemplary learning with respect to the assessment question, while 18.6% demonstrated less than satisfactory learning.
Course Designations
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.