Centers for Sustainability Across the Curriculum I know many of you are at least somewhat familiar with AASHE, but for those who aren’t, we are … We’re going to focus this session on a new program we launched last year called the Centers for SAC program. I’ll give a brief intro to the program, and then we’ll have representatives from two of the centers talk about their participation. Julian Dautremont-Smith June 27, 2017

Origin Recommendation: Develop Regional Centers for Sustainability that can provide professional development and support for faculty. In 2010, AASHE hosted a Summit on Sustainability in the Curriculum. One of the ideas that came out of the meeting and is reflected in this document is the notion of establishing Regional Centers for Sustainability that would provide faculty development workshops and ongoing support for faculty in the region. AASHE went through a number of transitions after this report came out and basically this idea had been dormant for several years when I came back to AASHE in 2015 and resurrected it.

Starting Assumptions Ensuring that all students have the knowledge, skills, and motivation to be leaders for sustainability will require dramatic increase in the number of courses that incorporate sustainability themes. Therefore, many faculty members will need to be provided the tools and training to effectively integrate sustainability themes into their courses. These seem like fairly straightforward, uncontroversial claims. The main question we face then is how to make this training happen.

Existing Resources Annual AASHE Sustainability Across the Curriculum Leadership Workshops had trained several hundred faculty in the Ponderosa Project and Piedmont Project model of curriculum change. Dozens of institutions are successfully implementing the model on their campuses. So, we asked ourselves whether it might be possible to partner with institutions who had successful curriculum change programs to see if they might be willing to expand training to faculty from other institutions. Our assumption being that campuses operating locally using their own expertise are going to be able to offer training at a lower cost than us. And perhaps more importantly, engaging a variety of trainers from different institution types would foster a greater diversity of training, thereby better meeting faculty needs and also help the network to learn much faster what works and what doesn’t. Open call in summer of 2016; 26 institutions applied to participate and we ultimately selected 13 institutions to pilot this idea with us.

13 Inaugural Centers

Expectations for Centers Organize at least one faculty training program annually open to faculty from other institutions. Develop the program and pedagogy for each program. Help promote the program. Manage registration and other logistics. Provide attendance/evaluation data to AASHE. Share resources via Campus Sustainability Hub.

AASHE’s Role Promote Center programs to AASHE’s networks. Develop materials to used by Centers (e.g., participation certificates, evaluation surveys, etc). Coordinate the network of Centers and facilitate learning across it. Provide recognition and visibility for Centers.

Next Steps Evaluate year 1 with pilot Centers. Is there sufficient demand to support additional Centers? What additional support is needed? How can we support participants beyond the workshop? Grow the number of Centers strategically.