Project Goals and Activities [top]

The overall goal of this project is to enhance the undergraduate curriculum by integrating environmental issues across disciplines. This goal will be accomplished with the following measurable objectives.

1. Offer professional development to 20 faculty members from a range of disciplines that focuses on enhancing environmental literacy.
2. Modify individual courses to include environmental issues as an integrating theme.
3. Measure student environmental literacy in classes taught by participating faculty.

Initially, the program will involve 20 faculty members from a variety of disciplines. Faculty must apply in order to ensure that the group is truly interdisciplinary. Efforts will be made to include faculty from disciplines that are not traditionally environmentally-oriented, such as English, Chemistry, and Fine Arts. This faculty selection process is based on the recommendations from the AASHE workshop noted above. Faculty will be selected by the project facilitators Drs. Michele Morrone (Environmental Studies) and Nancy Manring (Political Science).

Participating faculty will be asked to: (a) read several books on environmental sustainability; (b) participate in the Faculty Development Workshop; (c)  revise one syllabus to integrate environmental issues; (d)  participate in a facilitated monthly discussion group; and (e) work with project facilitators to assess the impacts of syllabus change. The timeline for the proposed project is as follows:

·        August 2007: Project facilitators meet to begin planning activities and develop call for participants

·        September-October 2007: Project is promoted and participants solicited

·        November 2007: Participants provided with reading material

·        December 2007 (intercession): Faculty Development Workshop

·        January 2008: Participants submit revised syllabus and monthly discussion group begins

·        February 2008-June 2008: Facilitated monthly discussion groups

·        July-August 2008: Project facilitators submit grant proposal to Ohio Environmental Education Fund to seek additional

         funding for continuation of effort; and prepare project report

The Faculty Development Workshop is the cornerstone of this project.  It will take place during the winter intercession and will involve one evening and one full day of training. The agenda for the workshop is in Appendix 4 and is based on the model and materials provided by the AASHE.  As the agenda notes, several “resource people” will contribute their expertise to the workshop (letters from the resource people are attached). The goal of the workshop is to foster environmental literacy among the participating faculty members so that they can enhance their teaching by incorporating environmental sustainability themes.

Following the workshop, faculty will revise one syllabus and submit the revisions to the project facilitators for posting on a community website. When the faculty member is ready to begin using his/her new syllabus, project facilitators will provide access to the on-line environmental literacy survey for students to complete before and after the class. These surveys will be one metric to assess whether integrating environmental issues in the traditional undergraduate curriculum enhances environmental literacy.

Faculty participants will be invited to facilitated monthly discussion groups to share experiences and continue to generate ideas for integrating environmental issues into the curriculum. Additional faculty will be invited to participate in these monthly sessions with the goal to begin developing a critical mass of environmentally-literate faculty members at Ohio University.

In July of 2008, the project facilitators will submit a grant application to the Ohio Environmental Education Fund to expand the reach of the project. The 1804 grant-funded effort will serve as a pilot project to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach to raising environmental literacy among undergraduate students.

Project Facilitators [top]

This project will be facilitated by Drs. Michele Morrone and Nancy Manring who share a common background in environmental education and literacy. Both facilitators have been involved in developing environmentally-oriented curriculum at Ohio University and they both integrate diverse dimensions of environmental literacy into all of the current courses they teach.

Dr. Morrone is the Director of Environmental Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is also an Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the College of Health and Human Services; however, this project will fall under her Environmental Studies position. Prior to her appointment at OU, she was the Chief of the Office of Environmental Education at Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. In this capacity, she was the lead environmental educator for the state of Ohio. She also coordinated a multimillion dollar grant program that provided funding to schools, nonprofits, and industry in the state to conduct environmental education programs. In collaboration with two colleagues, she developed a metric to test environmental literacy that will make an important contribution to the Kanawha Project.

Dr. Nancy Manring is an Associate Professor in Political Science and the Associate Director of the Environmental Studies program. She also coordinates the Undergraduate Certificate in Environmental Studies. Dr. Manring has been involved in environmental literacy in various forms for many years. Before coming to Ohio University, she worked as an environmental educator at Glen Helen Outdoor Education Center in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Dr. Manring was responsible for preparing the curriculum proposal for the Undergraduate Certificate in Environmental Studies.  She also participated in the Freshman Year Enrichment Program, which was dedicated to raising environmental literacy of incoming freshmen at OU, and she taught an Environmental Literacy Seminar in 2001.

Conclusion [top]

This proposal directly addresses Vision Ohio goals for undergraduate education by enhancing the curriculum to include environmental issues. Specifically, by integrating environmental issues across the curriculum, the goal of "inculcating students with a sense of personal responsibility and acquainting students with the values associated with the public good" will be addressed. This will be done without the creation of new courses, rather by revising existing courses.

Faculty willing to redesign their courses to incorporate environmental issues will come from all disciplines, thus creating a diverse community of educators dedicated to the same mission. This proposal also directly relates to Vision Ohio Goals of enhancing national prominence by preparing Ohio University faculty to join the growing network of prestigious universities involved in AASHE, including many of our peer institutions such as University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of New Hampshire, and Auburn which are currently AASHE members.

In the past several years, environmental initiatives have become more prominent at Ohio University.  The institutional commitment to sustainability is evidenced by investments in facilities, personnel, and planning. Enhancing the curriculum is the next step to accomplishing our environmental goals. By integrating environmental issues throughout the undergraduate curriculum using faculty development, this proposal will add an important missing component that will enhance the effectiveness of Ohio University's recent environmental investments.