Original Articles

Krista Bailey, MLS and Mike Keen, PhD, LEED AP

Center for a Sustainable Future, Indiana University South Bend, South Bend, IN.

Introduction

At Indiana University (IU) South Bend, we have developed a program that pro-vides for a seamless transition from classroom to career within sustainabil-ity studies. The secret to our success has been the recognition that this process re-quires a holistic approach to our curricu-lum, and it began before the first student entered our classes. In this case study we share a series of best practices that have allowed us to achieve this goal for all of our students in sustainability studies.

In our experience, sustainability studies offer a particularly fertile platform for such a transition because of its necessar-ily interdisciplinary perspective as well as the requirement that its teaching and learning extend beyond the classroom, and, even better, beyond the boundar-ies of the campus. Its pedagogy is best delivered in a manner that integrates more traditional in-class lectures and

testing with student-centered learning that incorporates experiential learn-ing and civic engagement. Taking ad-vantage of the opportunities provided by this platform requires a systematic approach to designing a curriculum and set of classes that integrates theory and practice at every stage, from the first class to the final capstone experience.

Sustainability Studies at IU South Bend

Foundations

The process begins with our S201 Foun-dations of Sustainability course, a one semester class delivered in three distinct sections. In the first part of the class, the students are introduced to the theoreti-cal and scientific foundations of sustain-ability using the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD), devel-oped during the last 20 plus years by Karl-Henrik Robert and The Natural StepTM.1

The focus is on developing an awareness of sustainability and providing baseline data. Students are required not only to learn the scientific foundations and sys-tem conditions of the framework, but also to be able to present the framework to an audience beyond the classroom us-ing a 20-slide Power Point presentation (adapted from The Natural Step). In the second portion of the course, students develop their own “sustainability tool box,” acquiring conceptual tools such as embodied energy, dematerialization, life-cycle analysis, upstream/down-stream, cradle-to-cradle, and biomimic-ry. They familiarize themselves with such sustainability protocols as Energy Star, LEED, and the Global Reporting Initia-tive. Through research and by deter-mining the return on investment (ROI), they discover the latest sustainability technologies (e.g., solar and wind, low flow water devices, day lighting options) that are currently available and how to determine whether or not these are

Case Report: The Classroom-to-Career Transition at Indiana University South Bend

Abstract

In this case study we share best practices for creating a seamless transition from classroom to career within a sustain-ability framework. In our experience, achieving this requires integrating theory and practice along with learning in and beyond the classroom into the very structure of the curriculum and its core courses. We begin with an introduc-tory course based on the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development. In this course, students develop their own “sustainability tool boxes,” and put what they learn into practice in a role-playing exercise and a final House-hold Sustainability Action Plan. This provides students with a holistic framework into which they can integrate the sustainability elective courses they choose from a variety of other departments. To complete their programs and make the transition to the next step in their careers, students must participate in a sustainability internship or a sustainability practicum. In the internship they apply what they have learned and reflect on the challenges of putting sustainability into practice in real-life settings. In the practicum, they evaluate their own leadership skills, study cases of sustainability in action, meet local sustainability professionals so they may begin to create their own sustainability networks, and assemble application packages for either a graduate program or a position in sustainability.

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • Vol. 7 No. 1 • February 2014 • DOI: 10.1089/sus.2014.9815 Sustainability 63

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64 Sustainability MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. • Vol. 7 No. 1 • February 2014 • DOI: 10.1089/sus.2014.9815

appropriate for their homes or work-places. These concepts, protocols, and technologies provide them with a set of tools to help them be able to address the challenges of sustainability identified in the first portion of the course.

In the third and final portion of the course, students engage in a role-play-ing exercise in which they do a baseline analysis, create a compelling vision, put together a sustainability action plan, and identify metrics to evaluate the environ-mental impact and ROI. The exercise is set in the fictitious Paradise Hotel, which we adopted from The Natural Step, and decided to locate on the northwest coast of Lake Michigan near Traverse City. Many of our students have vacationed in this area, so the exercise feels real to them. After simulating the sustainabil-ity planning process, students get to put their skills and knowledge into practice. Instead of a final exam, the final project for the course is to create a Household Sustainability Action Plan, using the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) and their sustain-ability toolboxes, and present highlights of the plan to the rest of the class on exam day.

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability, and the requirement that we use our academic resources as efficiently and effectively as possible, most of the substantive courses in our sustainability studies curriculum are taught by faculty members from other disciplines and departments in sci-ences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and business. While these courses all contribute to a greater understanding of sustainability, not all faculty mem-bers provide a holistic overview of how their courses and disciplines fit into the sustainability framework. Our foun-dations course allows the students to develop this for themselves. In a kind of subversive form of reverse mis-sion, our students, through their ques-tions and participation in these classes, begin to educate and encourage faculty to integrate this framework into their own work if they have not already done so.

Capstone

The next touch point for our classroom-to-career mission is in our capstone

courses. In addition to the foundations course in our program and the substan-tive courses offered by our faculty col-leagues in their own departments, every student must complete a capstone course: the S491 Sustainability Internship or the S490 Sustainability Practicum.

Internship. The internship is an indi-vidual semester placement in a particu-lar sustainability setting. Placements are selected jointly with the student based on his or her primary area of study or field of interest. To date, we have had students working on organic farms, designing sustainable systems for purchasing and distribution at the Mish-awaka, Indiana, offices of B Corpora-tion bookseller Better World Books,2 and doing research and writing for the magazine Indiana Living Green.3 Although the placements tend to be individual, interns gather as a group three times a semester to reflect and to share insights as well as challenges to practicing and communicating sustain-ability in real-life settings.

The internship course consists of 100 hours, with at least 80 hours spent in the field and 20 spent on readings and reflections. Students write a series of blog posts for the IU South Bend Cen-ter for a Sustainable Future blog, Talking Sustainability,4 that directly reflect their applied understanding of the FSSD learned in the S201 course. Students begin by looking at their own lives and if they are contributing to making the planet more sustainable. In additional postings they are expected to look ho-listically at sustainability in practice by identifying how their activities are positively affecting the use of our natu-ral resources and what students are learning from the internship about helping people meet their needs while also maintaining a sustainable lifestyle. To close their experience, students are asked to share how they think their in-ternship has helped grow a more sustain-able future in our region. The readings range from The Sustainability Primer,5 excerpts from systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows,6 and excerpts from Paul Rogat Loeb’s exceptional piece on service work, Soul of a Citizen,7 to a cre-ative nonfiction piece by Scott Russell Sanders, a writer who “examines the hu-man place in nature, the pursuit of social

justice, the relation between culture and geography, and the search for a spiritual path.”8 This broad selection of styles and topics provides a multidisciplinary array of concepts that allows the students to make connections and develop a strong interdisciplinary approach to thinking about, communicating, and practic-ing sustainability. The blog posts, 10 in total per student, combined with a post-internship supervisory evaluation, provide an effective evaluation of their experience and understanding.

Practicum. Unlike the internship, the practicum is a group experience with interludes of individual work. In the practicum students work though Peter Senge’s Necessary Revolution, which of-fers a systems approach to integrating sustainability into complex organiza-tions, along with a series of compelling case studies and practical exercises.9 They also explore Bob Willard’s Sustain-ability Champion’s Guidebook, which offers best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and paradoxes to use to become a suc-cessful sustainability leader and catalyst within one’s own organization.10 Using instruments the instructors have con-structed based on these materials, stu-dents conduct self-assessments of their sustainability leadership strengths and weaknesses and identify the organiza-tional roles they are best positioned to take advantage of in their current circum-stances.

Additionally, the faculty member teach-ing the class invites eight to 10 of the most prominent sustainability champi-ons in the community to come and meet with the students. Each guest is asked to begin with his or her personal story of becoming a sustainability champion. Guests also include an overview of their business or organization and their role within it and the biggest challenges they have encountered and how they have responded to them. The students are expected to question champions based on the materials they have been us-ing and recognize how these champi-ons have, consciously or not, employed the best practices as described in their studies of Senge9 and Willard.10 In ad-dition to invaluable practical knowl-edge gleaned from these visits, students must introduce themselves to our guest, exercising the networking skills they

Original Articles

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have been studying. This practice assures that students will leave the course with the beginnings of their own sustainabil-ity network in place, a network that has already led several students to job and internship offers.

Transitions

Finally, as with the foundations course, there is no final exam, but a Transition from Classroom to Career Exercise. Within the final exercise, each student must do a career self-assessment and determine his or her next stage—they choose either an employment track or an advanced education track. Those choos-ing the employment track must identify and describe five sustainability-related positions currently open to which they could realistically apply. Next they must select one from that group and explain why they made this choice and how their knowledge, skills, and experience have prepared them for the position. They prepare a résumé tailored for the posi-tion, based on a guest lecture by our career services experts and a personal consultation with our Career Services Center. Finally, they must download any application materials and complete them. The whole package is then turned in and presented to the rest of the class on exam day. Those choosing advanced education must do similar work. They begin by identifying five currently open graduate programs in sustainability (MA, PhD, or professional) to which they could rea-sonably apply. They then choose one, ex-plain why and how they are qualified for the program, prepare a curriculum vitae, and download and complete all applica-tion materials for their chosen program. While students are not actually required to submit the application materials to their chosen education or professional tracks, many have, and with success.

Conclusion

In order to make this seamless transition for classroom to career possible, there is one more requirement often overlooked by those in academic settings. As faculty members we ourselves must venture be-yond the boundaries of the campus and establish strong collaborative relation-ships with the communities and regions

in which we live through a strong pro-gram of civic engagement. This includes the business, not-for-profit, municipal and state government sectors, as well as the broader public. This is not a typical or even comfortable activity for many academics, but it is fundamental to a successful sustainability studies pro-gram and especially the ability to deliver a seamless transition from classroom to career for our students. It also offers sev-eral collateral benefits for our program. Though our civic engagement we have been able to develop local and regional prominence as an institutional leader and resource for sustainable commu-nity and economic development. This has led to numerous invitations to make presentations, and a few requests for consulting. It has also allowed us to work hand in glove with our campus development office, raising more than $100,000 per year in direct and indirect support for our programs. While this has led to our being recognized on cam-pus and in the region as one of the out-standing programs at IU South Bend, its greatest benefit has rebounded back to our students. Just as our students have been able to use the communities in which they live as learning laborato-ries and extended classrooms, the busi-nesses, organizations, and municipal agencies with which we work are recog-nizing our students as future employees who will be able to offer them the exper-tise and leadership they require to take full advantage of the newly emerg-ing green economy and harvest the potential it offers them for innovation and prosperity.

By practicing the very methods we are teaching and taking a holistic, commu-nity-oriented, systems-based approach to developing our curriculum, our stu-dents, and our community, we have been able to implement a strong program that is providing students with both a theo-retical and practical understanding of sustainability. In turn, this has benefitted the community, both on-campus and be-yond, by putting engaged students who understand the what, where, when, why, and how of sustainability into practice.

Author Disclosure StatementNo competing financial interests exist.

References

1. Keen M, and Bailey K. The Natural Step for colleges and universities. Sus-tain J Record 2012; 5(3):147-51. See also: Karl-Henrik R. The Natural Step Story: Seeding a Quiet Revolution. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Co-lumbia, Canada, 2002; Cook D. The Nat-ural Step: Towards a Sustainable Society. Green Books, Foxhole, England, 2004.2. To learn more about Better World Books and B Corporation status, visit: http://www.betterworldbooks.com/ (last accessed 12/22/2013).3. Wenck E. ed., Indiana Living Green. NUVO, Inc. Indianapolis, IN. http://www.indianalivinggreen.com/ (last ac-cessed 12/22/2013).4. Talking Sustainability. Center for a Sustainable Future, Indiana Univer-sity, South Bend. https://www.iusb.edu/csfuture/blog/?cat=3 (last accessed 12/22/2013).5. Baxter K, Boisvert A, Lindberg C, et al. United States The Sustainability Prim-er: Step by Natural Step. The Natural Step, Portland, OR, 2009. https://www.iusb.edu/csfuture/docs/tnsprimer (last accessed 12/20/2013).6. Meadows D. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Jct., Vermont, 2008.7. Loeb PR. Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, 2nd ed., St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 2010.8. Sanders SR. Biography. http://www.scottrussellsanders.com/biog.html (last accessed 7/31/2013). 9. Senge P, Smith B, Kruschwitz N, et al. The Necessary Revolution: Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. Broadway Books, New York, 2010.10. Willard B. The Sustainability Cham-pion’s Guidebook: How to Transform Your Company, New Society Publish-ers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2009.

Address correspondence to:Krista Bailey, MLSCenter for a Sustainable FutureIndiana University South Bend1700 Mishawaka AvenueSouth Bend, IN 46634-7111

E-mail: kob@iusb.edu

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