SACI hosted their sustainability symposium today to showcase progress made by their award winners.
The award winners each presented results and lessons learned from their grant programs, each aimed at integrating sustainability into brand new or existing undergraduate courses.
Jill Sohm, the Academic Director for the Sustainability Across the Curriculum Initiative, said the initiative is important for increasing conversations of sustainability in the classroom.
Jill Sohm: This initiative started out as a way to give support through grants to faculty who wanted to incorporate sustainability into their classes; either existing classes or create brand new classes and also to give them resources to be able to learn how to do that and actually produce those classes.
Colin Maclay, an SACI grant winner and Director of the Annenberg Innovation lab, agreed saying the initiative and symposium are important for sharing ideas and developing new teaching strategies.
Colin Maclay: The opportunity to have an interdisciplinary conversation to hear how others are teaching how others are learning what others are seeing, is just hugely valuable to kind of help us to reflect on our own practice, and ideally, to improve it.
The symposium was primarily for USC faculty to share information and learn how participants in the SACI program approached teaching sustainability in their classrooms.
Maclay taught Climate Stories, a brand new class in which journalist and communications students worked on how to talk about climate change in a way that everyone would be able to understand. Maclay added that the students were very engaged.
Maclay: We were on a learning journey together. And we recognize that this big suite of really complex topics, we all had lots to learn, and we all had something to share. And so we kind of took it on together and really encouraged students to follow the things that they were excited about an interested in.
As for the future, the initiative is not accepting new applications currently but is hoping to start accepting new applications before the end of the fiscal year.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Tobey Groome.