Franklin College Switzerland established the Center for Sustainability Initiatives in June 2009, which has helped coordinate and facilitate the growing number of efforts to incorporate sustainability into the curriculum. This past year’s efforts have focused on increasing the sustainability content of select courses and travel programs, introducing a new environmental sciences minor, and coordinating a transdisciplinary collaboration across three courses. The efforts have achieved much success. Class projects engaged students actively into sustainability research focused at the campus level; students presented several of these projects at a campus forum in the spring. The new minor was approved by Franklin’s administration and has already been selected by several students. Lastly, the transdisciplinary collaboration generated fruitful discussions among the students involved and yielded several products including a virtual Sustainability Quilt.
Franklin College Switzerland is a small, private bachelor-degree granting institution in Lugano, Switzerland. In the highest tradition of the liberal arts, Franklin College advocates that international studies be an integral part of higher education, as a prelude to and basis for a student’s commitment to a major field of study. Franklin College defines higher education from its beginning as the experience of thinking internationally. Our emphasis, both academic and social, on global perspectives strives to affect the direction and meaning of a student's college experience, life and career. In particular, the global responsibility portion of the core curriculum is designed to respond to shifts in socioeconomic and political conditions around the world. One issue to which we have increasingly responded in our curricular revisions has been sustainability. Additions and revisions to our curriculum in the last five years have involved course development, redesign of the core curriculum, and the development of a new program of study. Courses relating to sustainability were developed in art history, communication and media studies, comparative literary and cultural studies, economics, environmental studies, management and political science. Franklin’s academic travel program has seen sustainability-related travels to destinations such as Croatia, the Elbe River, India, and Namibia. Our newly-revised core curriculum requires all students regardless of field of study to take courses related to social responsibility and sustainability. Lastly, Franklin developed an interdisciplinary program of study in environmental studies that allows interested students to develop a multi-disciplinary background in environmental and sustainability issues. Although most of these changes occurred organically, the establishment of the Center for Sustainability Initiatives at Franklin (CSIF) in 2009 has further facilitated and focused the efforts to incorporate sustainability across the curriculum. This best practice examines CSIF’s efforts in this respect.
Among CSIF’s goals is to promote the incorporation of sustainability issues into the existing curriculum at Franklin and to help develop new ways to approach the topic of sustainability from different perspectives in ways that engage students to think critically and synthetically about the what sustainability is and what challenges it presents to our campus and our world.
The CSIF has focused on three main types of curricular initiatives regarding sustainability this past year. The first of these has been the incorporation of sustainability projects into courses. The creation of the CSIF has provided a natural laboratory for courses from a broad range of disciplines. This has the benefit of actively engaging students in research into sustainability issues at a level that is immediately relevant to them: on-campus. These courses designed student projects where students functioned as consultants to CSIF. These courses included two business classes (one in marketing, one in strategic management), one course in geography, one in art history and visual culture, one in environmental studies, and two in communication and media studies. Several of these classes were capstone courses and the sustainability project in each course represented the students’ final projects. Faculty also developed several new academic travels focusing on sustainability issues. One of these approaches the preservation of Paris as a world heritage site from the point of view of visual culture. A second is looking at Iceland and its approach to sustainability. A side project of CSIF is also looking at how the Academic Travel program can incorporate more sustainable aspects in its execution as well. The second initiative involved the development of an environmental science minor. The minor allows students in other fields of studies to pursue a set of courses focusing on the scientific perspectives of environmental and sustainability issues that compliments their studies in another field. The last major initiative was a trans-disciplinary collaboration project between three courses on the topic of catastrophe during the spring 2010 semester. The three courses involved were an art history course (The Visual Culture of Disaster), a comparative literary and cultural studies course (Tales of Catastrophe), and an environmental science course (Chemistry and the Environment). Although each course had its individual syllabus and generally met separately, three joint sessions were held that focused on understanding specific natural and man-made disasters from the different disciplinary perspectives. The goal was to explore how we have understood and responded to catastrophes historically and then to consider lessons we might learn for the future. During the first two joint sessions, students learned how to conduct research and discussion in a trans-disciplinary model studying the London killer fogs of 1951 and the Chernobyl nuclear power disaster of 1986. The last joint session focused on how to classify and approach climate change as a pending global catastrophe and how a trans-disciplinary collaboration can contribute to raising awareness and to initiate a shift towards a more sustainable way of life. In each joint session, student groups from each class were required to present relevant topics and lead discussions.
The first year of CSIF’s curricular initiatives has been a great success. In addition to the many class discussions and activities revolving around sustainability, we have seen the development of several major reports and completed projects from the different classes across the disciplines.
Collective results include:
Analysis of the implementation of the SIGG bottle initiative
Strategic management plan for CSIF
Branding CSIF
Sustainability analysis for Franklin 2010
In particular, the “Catastrophe” trans-disciplinary collaboration proved quite successful for its first rendition. Students engaged in insightful discussions across the disciplines and produced several noteworthy projects, including a virtual Sustainability Quilt, a campus-wide performance devoted to sustainable fashion, and an all-campus forum on the implications of sustainability in the different disciplines.
The curriculum connections to CSIF and the multidisciplinary nature of the collaborations provide the two main innovations in these activities. The connection to CSIF has provided the impetus for many class projects and engages students actively in research and actions that directly affect their local environment. The collaboration among faculty across disciplines allows students to explore the full concept of sustainability throughout their courses, from cultural, economic, ecological, and social perspectives.
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