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1 Sustaining Curricula 2021

Sustaining Curricula 2021 was a series of four interdisciplinary faculty panels at Barnard College that took place virtually in the Spring 2021 semester. Barnard’s Center for Engaged Pedagogy (CEP) planned this series with the Office of Sustainability and Climate Action and faculty to encourage professors to integrate climate action, sustainability, and the environment into their courses in authentic, inclusive, and justice-oriented ways and to cultivate a culture of interdisciplinary pedagogical exchange and collaboration.

To involve multidisciplinary faculty, the planning committee chose four themes that could be researched and taught from different and intersecting disciplines: Theorizing the Environment, Climate Change and the Anthropocene, Environmental Justice, and Design Decarbonization. Each panel consisted of three to four faculty who spoke to how they interpreted the theme and integrated it into their courses. We asked each panel a set of questions, including: How have you changed your course design? How do you teach sustainability within your subject and field? How does sustainability connect to your research and work outside of the classroom? Although the questions remained fairly standardized, the conversations varied based on the panelists and theme. Faculty members in the audience contributed questions as well as their own perspectives and expertise.

We aimed to cast a wide net of participants to attract faculty who might be drawn to one or two themes as well as faculty who were eager to contribute to every conversation. For faculty who were only able to join us for one panel, we hoped to spark interest and motivation to relate the themes, ideas and practices discussed to their own teaching. For the faculty who attended repeatedly, we hoped to foster connections not only to the material but to one another by building a community around interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches that center the environment. We invited faculty attendees to stay after the panel for a workshop session that enabled them to brainstorm with colleagues how to overcome challenges and concerns for incorporating the environment into their courses and how to collaborate with one another across disciplines and curriculum. We invited students to attend the panel portion of the event to listen and ask questions about the inclusion of the environment in their curriculum. Students also moderated each of the panels. The student moderators came from the CEP and the Student Government Association’s (SGA) Sustainability Representatives and Committee. Since many of our students have grown up with the effects of climate change and will inherit the world we leave behind, their voices were crucial to the conversation.

This series was a response to Barnard’s Climate Action Vision (2019) which was the result of a campus-wide effort from 2016–2018 that outlined the college’s 360-degree approach to climate leadership in academics, finance and governance, and campus culture and operations while prioritizing the role of women, people of color and low-income communities. The academic vision laid out in this document states two goals: (1) “All students graduating from Barnard engage with climate and sustainability from multiple perspectives in coursework and research across the curriculum; and (2) Barnard’s interdisciplinary approach to climate and sustainability supports innovative research, fosters civic engagement, and builds practical solutions.” This series was also a response to the recommendations that came out of Barnard’s 2020 Citizen’s Assembly. Barnard faculty, staff, students, and alumnae came together to create a set of recommendations to advance the goals articulated in Barnard’s Climate Action Vision. It specifically addressed the recommendation that Barnard create pedagogical support for faculty to create new courses or adapt existing ones in order that sustainability encompass all disciplines, with the “goal of 100% of the College’s students engaging with climate and sustainability before they graduate, in courses across the curriculum.”Footnote 1

In order to achieve this vision and carry out the recommendations, the CEP along with the Office of Sustainability and Climate Action created the series to inspire and foster the development of more classes and curricular pathways for students to engage with the environment. This aligned with the CEP’s mission to strengthen Barnard’s deep academic engagement and support for student and community wellbeing by creating diverse learning contexts, developing and sharing scholarship, building and sustaining relationships, and providing tools and resources. This series combined all of the CEP’s strategies for the dual purpose of supporting the integration of the environment into more courses and creating the space for faculty to partner, collaborate and build community in interdisciplinary ways.

Last year, the CEP partnered with the Office of Sustainability to create two communities of practice made up of faculty from different disciplines with a common interest in integrating sustainability, climate change, and the environment into their courses. Some of the faculty in these groups already had whole courses dedicated to studying the environment in fields like Environmental Science and Ecology, while others were intrigued to integrate it into their courses in English, Psychology, Education, History or deepening/broadening the focus of the environment in their courses within Urban Studies, Theater, and Anthropology. The exchange of scholarship, ideas, and pedagogical approaches that occurred in these two communities was matched by the community and relationship building that was taking place among colleagues from different departments. Faculty were guest lecturing and guest critiquing, sharing source recommendations, and helping construct learning activities in one another’s courses. As multidisciplinary communities, they helped review and conceptualize the Environmental Humanities Minor/Concentration proposal to create a new curricular pathway for students. These communities made practical changes to their own courses, those of their colleagues, and the curriculum at large while also pushing the bounds of their disciplinary understandings and approaches to the environment.

This year, we wanted to build on last year’s work by shifting from learning communities of a few committed participants to a series open to all Barnard faculty and students. The faculty panels, each of which included at least one member of last year’s learning communities, showcased the critical inquiry and creativity that took place in those communities of practice and inspired further thinking and innovating for the subsequent workshops. During the workshop sessions, faculty discussed how to integrate climate, environment, and sustainability into course content and requirements; generated different forms of faculty synergies; offered possible interventions for challenges that arise when integrating the environment into a course or trying to design collaborative teaching practices; and acknowledged the emotional intelligence and responsibility that is required for teaching these topics and teaching them well.

Before we introduced each panel, Yuval Dinoor (’21), CEP student worker and advisory member, read a land acknowledgment that she wrote especially for the series. The following statement she created recognizes Indigenous people and their land rights and reinforces the importance of land pedagogy and Indigenous knowledge in conversations about sustainability and climate action.

We may all be joining from various locations, but we would like to acknowledge that our university campus exists as a result of violent territorial displacement. In the making and expansion of our campus, Barnard College is occupying Lenapehoking, unceded land stewarded by the Lenni Lenape people, and gentrifying Harlem, a historically Black and Latinx neighborhood. As we discuss sustainability at Barnard during these sessions, we must also take seriously the responsibilities that come with taking institutional accountability for the ongoing violence we perpetuate in these communities, including redistributing institutional resources to Indigenous organizations, hiring and fairly compensating BIPOC workers for their labor, advocating for holistic community safety practices that decenter policing, and using Barnard’s academic spaces to reflect honestly on the devastating impacts of colonization.

This land acknowledgment she created signifies some of the intersecting themes that were addressed in the panel discussions, specifically colonization and environmental justice and, more broadly, the relationship between land and people.

I would like to thank the Center for Engaged Pedagogy team including Alex Pittman, Joscelyn Jurich, Annebelle Tseng, and Hana Rivers in partnership with Sandra Goldmark and Leslie Raucher from the Office of Sustainability and Climate Action and Maria Rivera Maulucci, Professor of Education and Severin Fowles, Associate Professor of Anthropology for conceptualizing, implementing and sharing the series with the Barnard Community.

The following sections provide brief summaries of the four panels, which feature faculty from History, Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Biology, Chemistry, Education, Sociology, Environmental Science, American Studies, Theater, and Architecture.

2 Theorizing the Environment

“I am convinced that climate change and the environmental crisis is not something that is only practical. It is also ideological,” says Orlando Bentacor, panelist in the session “Theorizing the Environment” (Chap. 22). The theme for this session came from the conversations we had in the communities of practice from the previous year, in which we discussed the ideological implications of the current climate crisis from multidisciplinary perspectives. It is further explored in the panel conversation between students, Yuval Dinoor and Rachel Elkis and faculty panelists, Orlando Bentancor, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Hilary Callahan, Professor of Biology, and Carl Wennerlind, Professor of History.

The panelists critique the dominant Western imperial and capitalist ways of conceptualizing the environment and the practical ramifications of these ideologies on human interactions with nature. Wennerlind and Bentancor both explore how hegemonic capitalist and imperial ideologies have impacted assumptions about nature and the ways people have engaged with it for centuries. Wennerlind argues that dominant ways of historical economic thinking that presume human desires and nature are infinite and expandable are partially responsible for our current climate crisis and lack of policies for present and future sustainability.

As an ecologist, Callahan adds that while she uses a cross-scale approach to teaching ecology from different spatial and temporal circumstances and vantage points, she includes some focus on sociopolitical ideology throughout her courses because she understands the implications that ecology has on law and policy and wants students to understand the relationship between ecology and the social, health and political spheres. She does not teach science as ideology-free or pure, because that was not how she was trained, and because she engages with scholarship outside of the white-male-dominated canon of historical texts from the United States and the United Kingdom. She seeks out ecologist publications from authors with different identities to provide a more inclusive and diversified learning experience and approach to studying ecology. Engaging with works from diverse authors and talking to colleagues outside of her discipline like Bentancor and Wennerlind help her become more aware of the hegemonic economic language that has been adopted by ecologists, such as “abundance,” “scarcity,” and “tradeoffs;” this work has also inspired her to seek out diverse voices and varied conceptual understandings of the field.

The panelists also demonstrate how their own thinking and theorizing about the environment has evolved over time as they continue to research the relationship between humans and the environment. Bentancor explains how his original post-structuralist theorizing of the environment blamed technology for the climate crisis. However, after reading a few different texts, named by Bentacor in the subsequent discussion, he shifted blame to capitalism for the climate crisis. Betancor’s research and teaching connect to Wennerlind’s because they both critically examine historical narratives of power, expansion, and economics, which have led to devastating material ramifications, as exemplified in Bentancor’s focus on the mining industry in South America.

In the discussion, the panelists emphasized the value of critically examining the dominant ways of theorizing the environment for the last 500 years and the detrimental practical implications of this thinking so that educators and students can change the narrative and transform how they think about and engage with the environment.

3 Climate Change and the Anthropocene

“How we define the problem is going to define where we look for solutions to the problem. If climate change isn’t happening, then there is nothing we should be doing differently. If humans are not responsible, then there is nothing we really can do to fix it,” warns Maria Rivera Maulucci, one of the panelists in “Climate Change and the Anthropocene” (Chap. 23). She then defines the Anthropocene for participants as the current geological age during which human activity is most responsible for climate and the environmental conditions and explains its significance in understanding the climate crisis and human responsibility.

This panel focuses on different pedagogical approaches to teaching about humans and the environment. Maria Rivera Maulucci, Professor of Education, is joined by Anthony Cagliotti, Assistant Professor of History, Andrew Crowther, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, and Jon Snow, Associate Professor of Biology and students, Aastha Jain and Yuval Dinoor.

The panelists summarize how their teaching and research connect to the theme. Snow, who teaches cell and molecular biology, acknowledges that most students come to this subject with an interest in human health and that he has slowly shifted the focus from human health to the health of other organisms, specifically pollinators. During the Anthropocene period, pollinators such as bees, which are important to the agricultural and natural ecosystems, are suffering and Snow’s hope is that while students may continue on their path into the medical and health fields, they will have a better understanding of ecological issues connected to human activity. Cagliotti acknowledges that history may not be the most obvious discipline to turn to when confronting the current climate crisis and future sustainability efforts because, like molecular and cell biology, people tend to think of history as human-centered and focused on the past. However, for Cagliotti, the focus on the Anthropocene, the part of history that connects human activity to climate change, must be understood in order to describe the devastating consequences of industrialization and farming on the environment as well as to contextualize scientific concepts like “climate.” Crowther teaches the physical chemistry and mechanisms that cause global warming, revealing inefficiencies in power plants and other modes of human-generated energy. He addresses climate change as a physical chemist with a very specialized and precise area of expertise, while Rivera Maulucci addresses climate change and environmental sustainability in courses on teaching science more broadly. She relies on standards for education for sustainability that can be used for K-12 curriculum development, offering her college students multiple pathways to create lessons on sustainability.

Though approaches and disciplinary knowledge differ between the panelists, all of them create authentic opportunities for students to actively engage in the learning process with meaningful real-world applications or connections. As Rivera Maulucci emphasizes, it’s important for students to do the work. She has students teach the lesson plans they create in her course in the K-12 classrooms. On the first day of class, Snow takes students outside to meet bees and assigns students their own independent projects at the end of term. Crowther applies concepts students learned in foundational courses to more specific cases like how solar cells and batteries work, how power plants waste energy, and how specific mechanisms cause global warming in his physical chemistry course. Cagliotti partnered with the Computing Science Center to offer a student data visualization workshop on how scientists visualize climate change in maps and graphs to emphasize the importance of modeling in understanding and predicting climate change as well as comprehending how knowledge is produced based on these visualizations.

The panelists also connect the theme to issues of justice and inclusion. Cagliotti builds on Rivera Maulucci’s discussion on how the concept of the Anthropocene has been contested by climate deniers and those who do not believe humans are to blame for the current climate crisis. According to him, the concept has also been considered controversial by those who argue that it conceals which humans, societies, and countries have predominantly contributed to global warming and the intersection of human inequities and environmental concerns. Similarly, Snow’s research on bees has led him to consider the connection between pollinators and food justice because bees are pivotal to the agricultural systems that reinforce uneven food distribution. Rivera Maulucci uses culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) as an umbrella approach to sustaining “rather than eradicating” the environment and culture of marginalized communities experiencing oppression. The Anthropocene becomes an important way to frame the relationship between humans and their diverse environments. At the same time, the panelists acknowledge that there are disparities in power dynamics between humans that impact how they engage with those environments.

In the discussion, the panelists share what and how they teach as well as the interdisciplinarity of teaching climate change, enabling educators and students to understand the Anthropocene as a multifaceted pedagogical topic that can be explored from various disciplines and areas of expertise.

4 Environmental Justice

“Environmental justice, in many ways, is just an extension of looking at unjust relationships. The relationship between people and the relationship between the earth…” says one of the panelists, Angela Simms, in “Environmental Justice” (Chap. 25). This discussion expands upon the comments made by the previous panelists by focusing on the intersections of human inequities, such as structural racism and wealth disparity with hazardous environmental conditions and unjust distributions of natural resources. Simms, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is joined by Elizabeth Cook, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Manu Karuka, Assistant Professor of American Studies and students, Rachel Elkis and Yuval Dinoor.

The panelists describe the evolution of incorporating environmental justice in their teaching. For example, Cook admits that while it is a major part of her research, she has only recently dedicated more time to it in her courses. As an ecologist, she explains that environmental justice, once focused specifically on economic disparity, now includes intersecting systems of oppression, such as structural racism. There is also a shift in concentration from the availability of green space and biodiversity in different communities to evolutionary trends in cities based on aspects of green spaces and species interactions with one another. For Karuka, his students’ interest in current events like Standing Rock and the Black Lives Matter movement has motivated him to include environmental justice cases within his courses. For example, he introduced the concept of slow death in his “Profits on Race” course in connection to Freddie Gray’s murder because before Gray was killed in the back of a police van, he was a victim of lead poisoning as a baby. Karuka seeks out collective questions from students to connect course material to current happenings in the world. Simm’s policy work in the federal government before becoming a sociology professor motivates her coursework. She discusses how federalism helps explain how different nestings of power and authority interact to impact geographies of opportunities for people and she provides students with the sociohistorical context in which to do environmental justice work.

Engaging in this material can feel very personal for students, and Simms tries to frame their roles in a sociohistorical context. She says,

You’re standing on the shoulders of giants—people have been resisting oppression since people have existed—so you now have the baton. I am equipping you to think through how to be more effective. I have to be a good steward of your energy, your time, your resources—but think about this as a process of negotiating with yourself and with others about how we engage each other on the earth. This is ongoing and it is going to be a lifelong process, so I want you to feel empowered to engage effectively.

She encourages students to think about their social locations and spheres of influence through formal and informal relationships and the different power dynamics at play. She assigns students to write op-eds to share their opinions on policies. Karuka has students write letters to themselves about the skills they have learned at Barnard and their assessment of racism in society. He says that many of those letters address environmental justice. His second writing assignment builds off the first and asks them to answer what they will do to fight racism or war. By the end of the semester, he hopes they are aware of their own agency and abilities to make change. Environmental justice is at the forefront of conversations in Cook’s classes, in which she prompts students to apply what they discuss in the classroom to their own communities, as she does in her participatory research with community members in Harlem and at the Mayor’s Office.

Partially because environmental justice can be so personal, an audience participant asked the panelists how they address eco-anxiety and grief from students that may feel overwhelmed by the current state of structural oppression and the environmental crisis. Karuka suggests that for those of us who are non-native, we can learn from Indigenous communities and philosophies on “how to survive catastrophe,” which Indigenous people have been doing for over 500 years. Likewise, Simms refers to a “reservoir of wisdom” from people of color who have been dealing with devastation for centuries. She recognizes that there are still serious emotional and mental challenges in doing this work and processing the pain and trauma of racism and climate crisis but her advice to students includes learning different histories and forms of wisdom.

In the face of the immense intersecting injustices discussed, the panelists model a collective agency and eagerness to work together, and with others, to make change and motivate those in their spheres of influence to do the same. The discussion is a call to action for educators and students to be agents in the collective struggle for environmental justice.

5 Design Decarbonization

“So what we are experiencing right now is enormous increases in CO2 levels compared to historical levels. The last time we had that high of a level was 3 million years ago and the earth was much, much warmer than it is today” cautions Martin Stute, one of the panelists of “Design Decarbonization” (Chap. 26). He presents a few visual graphs to demonstrate the urgency of reducing greenhouse emissions such as CO2. This process is known as decarbonization and requires individual, collective, and systematic changes to reach net zero emissions in order to prevent further climate change. The panelists share how they design decarbonization from their fields and in their classrooms. Stute, Professor of Environmental Science is joined by Kadambari Baxi, Professor of Professional Practice in Architecture, and Sandra Goldmark, Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Theatre and Director of Sustainability and Climate Action and students Linda Chen and Olivia Wang.

This panel uses data visualizations to reinforce the immediacy and seriousness of climate change and also to emphasize the role of design in conveying information and making change. Baxi explains that designing decarbonization requires collective authorship that includes scientific knowledge, global governance, worldwide collaboration, and activism. Goldmark shares her own experience learning about greenhouse emissions as a theater artist, trying to make connections between the global crisis and her own work. She started by decarbonizing her own design practices, which eventually led to redesigning her teaching practices as well.

The panelists reveal some of their pedagogical approaches to teaching and participating in decarbonization design. Goldmark uses circular design and production principles in her teaching and assignments. For example, after a student builds one model, they exchange their model with a peer and must design the second model from the material they find in their peer’s first model. In one of Baxi’s courses, she asks students to explore the relationship of museums to climate change and has them create exhibits that “make visible” the complex issues connected to climate change through a practice she has coined as “Climatorium.” In Stute’s Sustainable Development workshop course, groups of students act as mini consulting firms, and they work with outside clients on real problems that often involve climate change. These panelists employ pedagogical approaches that require students to work together and reinforce the “collective authorship” that Baxi mentions as essential for designing decarbonization.

In answering how to address the gravity of climate change authentically in everyday lives, the panelists address it at the individual level in which people can practice more sustainable daily routines and make change within their spheres of influence. They also emphasize the importance of systematic and structural change to tackle this global crisis. Stute advocates for voting as a small but essential practice and Baxi suggests collective organizing. Both practices connect individual action to structural change. Goldmark agrees that action should happen at the individual, collective and structural levels. She hopes this session will get participants to ask the question, “Okay, given where I am and where I am working, what can I do?” The panelists share what they are doing, given where they are, where they work, and what they do to reinforce the severity of our climate crisis and inspire educators and students to engage in their own efforts to design decarbonization.