Université Laval
AC-1: Academic Courses

Based on Arnim Wiek, Withycombe and Redman’s “Key competencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development” (2011), a mandated work group at Université Laval produced an evaluation grid for courses and programs. These grids have been submitted to teachers responsible for specific courses and heads of programs in order to make an inventory of courses and programs related to sustainability. Three different levels of integration of SD in courses were proposed to teachers (sensitization, introduction, in-depth), in-depth courses were considered sensibility courses for STARS purposes. All these courses in SD are regrouped and promoted under one label (SD-courses) : https://www.ulaval.ca/les-etudes/cours/repertoire.html?attributs=DEDU&page=0 The list of courses in sustainability is the result of auto-evaluations by responsible teachers, using a well-anchored theoritical questionnaire that addresses the development of key competencies in sustainability (KCS) as inscribed in their syllabus. This means there’s a learning outcome in SD related to those courses, written in the course’s syllabus and as evaluated by the responsible teacher. Sustainability courses at Université Laval respects the criteria C in G. Standards and Terms p.34 of the technical manual, as these courses provide "skills to address sustainability-related problems". For more details around the methodology we used, please write to daniel.forget@vraeis.ulaval.ca. As well, a paper about our methodology has been published : « Implementing Sustainability in the Classroom at Université Laval » (Richard, Forget et Gonzalez, 2017).

There are 63 academic departments where courses can be identified in SD. Seven other departments are either « direction departments » with research-related courses (thesis, internships, research…) or « art performance / clinical departments ». As all courses from these departments were exluded from our lists of courses in SD (exclusions proposed in technical manual, p. 32), we removed departments as well, as per definition, their contents are excluded from analysis.