Beloit College, a small liberal arts college with 1250 students, started its sustainability programming with a summer internship program. This programming grew with the help of a sizable three-year external grant (6/2014-5/2017) into a comprehensive program to integrate sustainability concepts and practices into the curriculum, operations, and culture of the college. Faculty and staff built the program, entitled Pathways to Sustainability Leadership, using the college’s Liberal Arts in Practice model, which engages students in cycles of learning, transfer, reflection, and self-assessment. Curricular activities included course-improvement grants to add sustainability-related modules to courses, summer internships, and collaborative teams of students and faculty or staff that worked on solutions to sustainability challenges. Changes in operations resulted from student proposals and funding from a revolving loan fund. Cultural integration occurred in academic and co-curricular activities. Staffing included a sustainability coordinator housed within Academic Affairs and a hall director housed within Residential Life, with oversight provided by a steering committee of faculty, staff, and students. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed on essays written by participants in response to Institutional Review Board-approved prompts. Participants provided consent for the use of their essays in these analyses.
Results/Conclusions
Pathways provided 436 student experiences. Faculty added sustainability modules to 17 courses across the natural and social sciences and arts and humanities, which enrolled 339 students. Summer internships involved 37 students and collaborative teams engaged 60 students and 20 faculty and staff. Students reported broadening and deepening of their sustainability understanding and wrote about their plans for engaging in additional sustainability-related activities. The essays from students in courses with sustainability-related modules achieved intermediate scores for knowledge, transfer, reflection, and leadership, whereas those written by students in internship and team activities scored highly in these areas. Faculty and staff said that the experiences met their sustainability-related expectations and that they would participate in similar activities in the future. The loan fund supported more than $140,000 of infrastructure changes including building insulation, LED lighting, and development of software for equipment for monitoring electrical usage in residence halls. Cultural integration included a public event that involved more than 1,500 people during the centennial of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, student involvement on energy, water, food, and communication teams, and many activities in the residence halls. Maintaining momentum for additional sustainability education and operational and cultural changes presents the current challenge.