Agnes Scott College
AC-2: Learning Outcomes

Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor Human activities change our planetary environment and resources on a scale that was previously unimaginable. Local, regional, and global organizations and governing bodies are assessing the impact and establishing new practices to preserve resources for the current and future generations. Environmental and sustainability studies is a unique interdisciplinary program that combines environmental studies and sustainability, encouraging students to think deeply and act on the challenges and solutions to the problems of the environment and its limitations, especially relating to human impact. Experiential learning is emphasized, with opportunities for student involvement in the sustainability effort on the Agnes Scott campus and off-campus through internships.

Starting in fall 2015, Agnes Scott College launched its new signature curriculum experience, SUMMIT, allowing students to become effective change agents in a global society. Regardless of their major, every Agnes Scott student will develop leadership abilities and an understanding of complex global dynamics. During the fall semester of their first-year, each student completes an introductory course to leadership development and global learning. For the classes of 2020 and 2021, their Global (GBL) 101 course focused on global food systems. This is a required course for all first-year students. While the course is taught by a variety of faculty, the course has consistent core themes and assignments across all sections. The GBL faculty has adapted the SUMMIT learning outcomes for course specific content. The learning outcomes are: Identify, explain, and analyze global themes, processes, and systems – using food as an example, you will be able to identify and describe crucial examples of how food is a global issue. Critically examine relationships between dominant and marginalized cultures: using selected examples, you can compare the different role food plays in the economic, cultural, and political areas of dominant and marginalized cultures. Demonstrate knowledge and skills essential for global engagement: you can contrast more than one perspective on specific aspects of food and communicate your insights in a final project. While students are assigned to a primary faculty, all GBL faculty lecture for each section, so students engage with the issue of global food systems from a multi-disciplinary approach, including the impacts of climate change on food and the role of major corporations in our modern food system.

The students counted for the GBL course are current students, and have not graduated at the time of STARS submission. Data was collected on all two of our classes that are cycling through the SUMMIT curriculum. The GBL 101 course will not always be focused on food, but we wanted to capture the data in this report, since it is an extraordinary achievement for the Agnes Scott faculty to adapt their various disciplines to a sustainability topic. Agnes Scott did not offer any graduate courses at the time of data collection and STARS submission, but they will be included in future reports with the launch of our graduate program in August 2018.