Dickinson College
EN-10: Inter-Campus Collaboration

Dickinson College led a four-year NASA funded project from 2010 to 2014 entitled Cooling the Liberal Arts Curriculum, A Campaign for Climate Change Education. The project engaged 178 educators from 60 colleges and universities and produced a rich assortment of teaching materials that are shared via a web portal: Cooling the Curriculum, A Learning Community for Climate Change Education, which can be found here: http://communities.earthportal.org/changingclimate/. Many of these resources are cross-published on the Climate Adaptation Mitigation and E-Learning (CAMEL) web-portal of the National Council for Science and the Environment. (http://www.camelclimatechange.org/) Dickinson College’s Provost and Dean of the College proposed and edited a special issue of AAC&U’s Liberal Education entitled Liberal Education for Sustainability that was published in 2012. The issue includes a paper written by the Dickinson Provost, Neil Weissman, entitled Sustainability and Liberal Education, Partners by Nature, plus two other papers by other authors that address sustainability education. (http://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/sustainability-liberal-education-partners-nature) The director and assistant director of Dickinson’s Center for Sustainability Education have given presentations on sustainability education at other colleges as well as at annual conferences of AASHE, AESS, NCSE, PERC, ECUBO, and Climate Smart Campuses.

American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Eco League National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) NCSE's Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD) Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium (PERC) Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA)

Dickinson College is a leader of the Pennsylvania Environmental Resources Consortium (PERC), an association of colleges and universities in Pennsylvania that promotes sustainability in higher education (see http://www.pagreencolleges.org/). The Director of Dickinson’s Center for Sustainability Education is a member of the PERC Executive Board since 2009 and was the president of PERC in 2013-2014. While president of PERC, he initiated a number of new programs to better engage students, faculty, and staff of PERC member schools. These include the Pennsylvania Campus Sustainability Champions program, which recognizes one student and one non-student champion from each PERC member school; the PA Student Sustainability Summit, which was organized and hosted by Dickinson College in April 2014 and was attended by more than 100 students from 25 colleges and universities; and the PERC Teaching About Climate Change Workshop, which was organized and hosted by Dickinson in January 2014 and attended by 52 faculty members from 24 colleges and universities. Each of these Dickinson initiated programs have been continued by PERC as annual events, with continued participation by Dickinson College. In 2014, Dickinson joined the Eco League, a consortium of six small liberal arts colleges that include Alaska Pacific University, College of the Atlantic, Green Mountain College, Northland College, and Prescott College. The member schools share similar missions and value systems based on environmental stewardship, social change, and educating students to build a sustainable future. All of the Eco League colleges stress experiential education and global perspectives based on a sense of place so students are prepared to take on real-world challenges when they graduate and create sustainable communities wherever they choose to work. Through student exchanges, the Eco League provides students opportunities to study places and ecosystems in different parts of North America. The Eco League also provide faculty of the member schools opportunities for collaboration and peer-learning. (http://www.ecoleague.org/) In Fall 2013, the director and assistant director of Dickinson’s Center for Sustainability Education organized and led a faculty development pre-conference workshop at the AASHE annual meeting. The workshop, The Next Wave – Faculty Development for Sustainability Across the Curriculum, was attended by 27 faculty members from 27 different higher education institutions. The purposes of the workshop were to share lessons from existing sustainability curriculum development programs and develop ideas for new programs of faculty and curriculum development for extending and deepening sustainability learning at participants’ schools. The assistant director of Dickinson’s Center for Sustainability Education has organized and co-led AASHE conference sessions in 2014 and 2013 that have brought together educators from liberal arts colleges to share lessons and experiences in sustainability learning. Dickinson College led a four-year NASA funded project from 2010 through 2014, Cooling the Liberal Arts Curriculum, A Campaign for Climate Change Education. Dickinson partnered with four community colleges and engaged with many other colleges and universities to build capacity for interdisciplinary teaching about climate change in the liberal arts. One-hundred seventy-eight (178) educators from 60 colleges and universities participated in professional development activities organized and hosted by Dickinson College. Project activities included a learning community for faculty, a four-day Changing Planet Workshop on interdisciplinary teaching about climate change held in summer 2010 and 2011, a four-day Climate Modeling and Data Tools Workshop held in summer 2010 and 2011, workshops and in-service sessions organized by the partner community colleges, development and sharing of teaching resources and pedagogies, mini-grants for teaching, faculty development and student-faculty research projects, and a one-day closing workshop on Teaching Climate Change Across the Curriculum. A partial count of courses created or revised as a result of the project is 73 courses at 19 colleges and universities. Enrollment data reported for 42 of the courses indicate nearly 2,000 students took the courses from fall 2010 through fall 2013. (http://www.dickinson.edu/info/20052/sustainability/2471/climate_education_and_research; http://communities.earthportal.org/changingclimate/) In 2011, Dickinson organized and hosted Seeding the Future, a conference on using college farms to teach sustainability in the liberal arts curriculum (see http://blogs.dickinson.edu/seedingthefuture/). The conference was co-sponsored by PERC and attracted 260 students, faculty, and farm staff from 60 colleges and universities across the U.S. Dickinson College often hosts visits by faculty and staff from other colleges and universities seeking to learn about our sustainability programs and to share information about their own programs. We have hosted groups from Franklin and Marshall College, Shippensburg University, Bucknell University, Messiah College, the University of Delaware and other schools. In addition, Dickinson faculty and staff are often invited to give talks at other institutions about our sustainability programs. These include, for example, Swarthmore College, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Richmond, West Chester University, Bucknell University, and Montgomery College. Dickinson faculty and staff have organized and presented in sessions at conferences of AASHE, AESS, NCSE, PERC, ECUBO, and Climate Smart Campuses. At the international level, Dickinson has coordinated with a number of colleges and universities that send delegations of students and faculty to the annual Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

PERC Student Sustainability Symposium: http://www.dickinson.edu/news/article/987/for_students_by_students Climate Change Education: http://www.dickinson.edu/info/20052/sustainability/2471/climate_education_and_research Seeding the Future conference: http://blogs.dickinson.edu/seedingthefuture/