Amherst College
AC-1: Sustainability Course Offerings

A complete inventory of sustainable course offerings was developed using the methodology described in credit AC 1.2. Sustainable course offerings were then grouped by department to determine the number of departments offering at least one qualifying course. Cross-listed courses with multiple department listings were only counted toward one department.

All departments listed on this page were considered in the final assessment. Departments offering multiple majors (i.e. Classics) were counted as one department. The following three umbrella departments were separated to form six distinct departments: Anthropology & Sociology; Physics & Astronomy; Math & Statistics. The following "program majors" were also counted as unique departments: Film & Media Studies, Biochemistry & Biophysics, Latinx & Latin American Studies; Neuroscience; European Studies, and Education Studies. A total of 38 departments were assessed.

A complete list of course offerings for the Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, and Spring 2024 semesters was obtained by web scraping Amherst’s Course Catalog. The dataset includes information on course titles, IDs, department listings, descriptions, and semesters offered. Following AASHE’s exclusion criteria, all courses in the following categories were removed from the dataset: special topics; half-credit courses (labs, discussions, music lessons, performance art classes); senior honors/thesis; internships; practicums; and independent study. 

After cleaning the dataset of course descriptions, a student intern used the text2sdg R package to detect keywords corresponding to each of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Six different query systems were implemented: Aurora, Elsevier, SIRIS, SDSN, OSDG, and USC’s published keyword list. Courses with two or more keyword hits were considered for the final inventory.

Following USC's classification method, we divided SDGs into two clusters: social/economic SDGs (1-5, 8-11, 16, 17) and environmental SDGs (6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15). Courses that mapped to SDGs in both clusters were tagged as sustainability-focused, and courses that mapped to only one cluster were tagged as sustainability-inclusive. Any courses whose distinctions were not clear were set aside for determination.

After a round of review by two Office staff members, suggestions and edits to course classifications were incorporated into the final course inventory.

The Office has published the inventory here, as a publicly accessible Shiny App. Users of the app can select a specific SDG of interest to see the list of suggested courses, based on the keyword association from the course description. For each course listed, users can see the list of associated SDG keywords. 

The college provides multiple options and incentives for faculty to integrate sustainability into their curriculum. The college recently received a multi-year grant from the Davis Education Foundation entitled "Embedding Experiential Learning Across the Curriculum". The grant is being overseen by the Office of Sustainability, Center for Community Engagement, and the Mead Art Museum. The Office of Sustainability has been working with a number of faculty to integrate the campus as lab concept into their courses as part of this grant. Faculty have proposed courses and assignments that focus on the sustainability of the campus farm, wildlife sanctuary, energy data, and campus dining, among others. Funding is available to develop or redesign an entire course ($2,500) or a single assignment ($500). Additional funding of up to $2,500 is available for some course related expenses. 

https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/experiential-learning/resources-for-faculty

The college also maintains a separate fund, the Dayton Fund, to support the development of new courses that integrate environmental science / environmental studies. Faculty can request a $5,000 summer stipend for the development of a new course.

https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/provost_dean_faculty/funding/internalfunding/dayton

The Office of Sustainability in collaboration with the Center for Community Engagement has been hosting a monthly faculty - staff field trip series / community of practice gathering aimed at promoting the campus as lab concept, designed to get faculty and staff to utilize the campus and its sustainability features (e.g., the campus farm, the campus wildlife sanctuary, sustainable building design features, campus energy data, civil war tablets, dining hall) in their course curriculum and co-curriculum planning. The program has been running for two years, and has been wildly popular with 154 different faculty and staff participating in the sessions.

https://www.amherst.edu/about/sustainability/programs/affiliates