In the 2009-2010 academic year, I co-founded the Sustainability Studies (SUST) program at Roosevelt University with my College of Professional Studies colleagues Mike Bryson and Brad Hunt. You can find out more about the Roosevelt University program through its homepage and blog. Mike and I cowrote an essay “Creating the Sustainable City: Building a Seminar (and Curriculum) Through Interdisciplinary Learning” for the July 2010 edition of Metropolitan Universities (link opens a PDF), which gives readers an idea of specific curricular goals for Roosevelt’s program and a good general sense of interdisciplinary sustainability pedagogy.

I moved to the Pratt Institute in 2012 to develop and teach sustainability courses as part of the larger sustainability initiative that includes the Pratt Sustainability Center, the Department Sustainability Coordinator initiative, and the Pratt Sustainability Coalition. We created Pratt’s Sustainability Studies Minor during the 2012-13 academic year, and I served as the co-ordinator of the minor until the end of the 2021-22 academic year.

The vast majority of Pratt students major in art, design, and architecture. Regardless of major, however, any Pratt undergraduate who has room for 15 credit hours of our courses may minor in Sustainability Studies. Over the past several years, students from all of those disciplines as well as the liberal arts and sciences have integrated the Sustainability Studies minor into their coursework. I attend crits and project presentations in several disciplines and am inspired by how our students use their disciplinary training to address the problems and challenges we present in the minor’s courses.

Spring 2022 courses:
SS-201T-01 The Sustainable Core (Mondays 5pm, North Hall)
SUST-410-01 Nature and Technology in History (Tuesdays 2pm, North Hall)

Fall 2022 courses:
SS-201T-01 The Sustainable Core (Mondays 2pm, Engineering Building)
SUST-405-02 Production, Consumption, Waste (Tuesdays 5pm, Engineering Building).