2018 Conference

Poster Presentation

When teaching about sustainability in the higher education context solely takes place in its traditional home of natural science classrooms, sustainability subject matter can only reach students studying in these disciplines. As such, sustainability subject matter ideally goes beyond the sciences in order to address complex problems that cut across economic, social, and environmental domains on local to global scales. Therefore, sustainability-related subject matter cannot be isolated into one specific class or one discipline, the way that it has been traditionally been sequestered. Although policymakers and researchers have called for sustainability to be integrated into the higher education curriculum, what kinds of sustainability-related subject matter are being taught? What does interdisciplinary higher education sustainability subject matter include? To answer these questions, this poster will present research results form a survey of 700 undergraduate students who reflect on the kinds of sustainability-related subject matter they were exposed to throughout the course of one academic semester (fall 2017). First, I will present frequencies of specific kinds of sustainability subject matter (such as environmental crises, environmental racism, future generations, etc.) students were exposed to in in order to better understand what kinds of sustainability content students are learning throughout their coursework. Second, I will report the extent to which sustainability subject matter differs across course contexts. I will present results from chi-squared analyses and ANOVAs on whether specific course categories (discipline, class type, and class size) differed in the kinds of sustainability subject matter they present to students. Findings can contribute to better understanding the kinds of sustainability-related subject matter students are learning, and perhaps, not learning.