USING INSTRUCTOR STORIES TO DEMONSTRATE THE ADAPTABILITY OF THE INTEGRATE INTERDISCIPLINARY SUSTAINABILITY CURRICULA

Instructor stories provide insights and ideas for incorporating engaging and effective activities into your course without sacrificing core content. Curricular materials from the NSF STEP Center, InTeGrate, are designed to increase Earth literacy and tackle multi-faceted issues facing society by using relatable, interdisciplinary material, promoting complex and systems thinking, utilizing real data and geoscientific methods, and fostering creative problem-solving. Supplementing the project’s classroom-ready materials, Instructor Stories document experiences of module authors and testers as they used the materials in the classroom. These experiences include adaptations made to accommodate different class sizes or formats, ideas for variations or extensions on activities, and identification of potential sticking points and how to overcome them. They are also a rich resource for those looking to make changes to their own curricula. Additionally, the stories showcase how the materials can be adapted for use in disciplines outside of the geosciences, thus building interdisciplinary connections that promote a more holistic approach to understanding and tackling Grand Challenges facing society. Each story provides context for use (class size, course-level, syllabus) as well as a unit-by-unit description for how materials were incorporated into class, details about the application of assessments, and a summary of the related outcomes. Each course/module also has a community page with a discussion board that allows users to share their experiences with the materials.

Building on the community of expertise and experiences, implementations of InTeGrate materials have been documented in instructor stories from faculty both within and outside of the project. For example, members of the InTeGrate Faculty Research team discuss how activities from several modules were utilized in introductory geoscience courses and biology instructors from the QUBES project document how materials were adapted for biology courses. Further, faculty involved with the InTeGrate Implementation Programs document how materials were used in multiple courses at the program-scale. Read more about how the community is using these materials: http://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/teaching_materials/community_materialuse