A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO TEACHING SUSTAINABILITY: CORN ETHANOL ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

The challenge of teaching undergraduates to frame issues of sustainability as complex, multidisciplinary problems requires faculty to consider how those problems are connected across their own disciplines. Most undergraduates at Bentley University major in business-related fields, but a focus on integrating the liberal arts and sciences with business has provided context for teaching sustainability beyond the purview of individual science courses. Through an NSF-CCLI (now TUES) grant, we have engaged Bentley faculty in a series of summer workshops designed to contextualize sustainability-related problems. In the first workshop, faculty from different natural science disciplines created technology-enhanced laboratory and classroom modules for students to explore those connections by generating and analyzing original data sets.

More recently, we have sought to expand this type of “across the curriculum” collaboration by engaging faculty from multiple departments. In summer 2011, faculty in accountancy, geography, political science, and economics joined with those in the natural sciences to design a common exercise: “Will Corn Ethanol Fuel U.S. Energy Needs?” The module introduces students to corn ethanol and the ethanol industry from various perspectives. Students are then given a large USDA data set (500+ data points) and asked to plot multiple variables, displaying production and use of U.S. corn since 1960. Students make interpretations about the variations through time and hypothesize how those trends are connected to agricultural, scientific, social, economic, and political processes.

In AY 2011-12, we employed the module in courses in Environmental Chemistry, Principles of Geology, Science of Sustainability, Microeconomics, and American Government. Instructors placed the exercise in context of their own course objectives so students could learn core concepts applied to a complex interdisciplinary problem. Students were assessed at the beginning and end of the semester to evaluate their ability to integrate knowledge across the natural and social sciences. A preliminary analysis of responses shows that while student content knowledge improved, most still have a difficult time describing the interdependence of disciplines in approaching issues of sustainability.