Furman University
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

The Shi Center for Sustainability (an interdisciplinary center housed in Academic Affairs) provides funding, information, and connections for course development. In recent years, this has resulted in the proposal of a new course on the topic of food and farming in the Carolinas; integration of food literacy survey data analysis into a Health Sciences class; a new team-taught freshman seminar on the environment’s portrayal in literature; provision of course and lab lectures and activities on requested topics, most often campus sustainability projects and features; funding for expansion of a teaching garden used primarily for a course on native plants; and a new non-credit summer course on community sustainability for high school students.

Depending on the nature of faculty interest, curricular topic, and scope of the curricular development, faculty may receive advising, guest lectures by Center staff or their contacts, collaborative time with relevant community professionals, and funding to support their associated research endeavors or course development per se. The interdisciplinary faculty affiliate program is the primary point of entrée into dialogue and action on curricular enhancement around sustainability. These efforts build on a series of curricular workshops conducted five years ago, and have focused particularly on reaching new faculty who were not at Furman during the workshops, as well as evolving teaching interests of those faculty who did complete the series.