Carnegie Mellon University
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

Carnegie Mellon has had two historic initiatives that have helped to define how sustainability is reflected in the University wide curriculum. The ‘Environment Across the Curriculum’ initiative and the ‘Greening of Early Undergraduate Education’ developed parameters for how faculty could infuse sustainability concepts into existing courses and how those concepts could influence the creation of new courses. More information about the sustainability education modules can be found here: http://www.cmu.edu/environment/education/sponsored-initiatives/index.html Carnegie Mellon University offers numerous environmental courses each semester. Some courses, often with prerequisites, help build expertise in the field of environmental engineering, science, architecture or policy. Many other courses help build environmental literacy, some incorporating environmental content into courses focusing on topics such as writing, history or art and others focusing on specific facets of environment and sustainability. We believe that frequent exposure to environment and sustainability in the context of different subject areas and embedded in courses as examples and cases convey to the students an imperative to consider environmental aspects in all they do.

Carnegie Mellon deliberately does not distinguish between sustainability focused and sustainability related courses in our course catalog. However for the purposes of this survey we have completed a review of our courses and offer a breakdown by category. The complete University schedule of courses is reviewed by A SEER staff member and a student assistant. In addition, list of courses developed by the faculty directors of the environmental minor degree programs were consulted. The courses were compiled and divided into categories by the SEER staff member and student assistant and the final list was reviewed by the SEER faculty director and the co-chair of the University Green Practices committee, also a faculty member.

Sustainability Focused and Related courses are compiled and added to the Environmental Education website each semester to assist students in choosing courses that fall into one of these categories.