Sections:
General Principles of Sustainability Education
Integrating Sustainability into a Course
Additional Resources
References
General Principles of Sustainability Education
Sustainability is critical to Santa Clara University’s vision to “educate citizens and leaders of competence, conscience, and compassion and cultivate knowledge and faith to build a more humane, just, and sustainable world.”
But what is it that we seek to teach? The United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) famously defined sustainable development as "meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (p. 24). In this view, sustainability involves attending to three dimensions: environmental, economic, and social. Similarly, Elkington (1998) suggested that business sustainability must be measured according to a Triple Bottom Line that includes people, profit, and the planet. And Pope Francis (2015) defined the crisis of sustainability in these terms:
We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, at the same time protecting nature (p. 139).
Because sustainability is a rich and pluralistic concept, there is considerable debate over how to define its dimensions. For example, should the environmental dimension focus on healthy environments for people alone or also for other species? Should economic sustainability strive to meet all people’s basic needs, or to ensure that all people can develop their full capabilities, and what degree of economic equity is necessary? Does social sustainability merely mean peace and stability, or also democracy and social justice (and does this include racial, gender, and other forms of justice), or something more? How should we resolve inevitable trade-offs between maximizing environmental, economic, and social aspects of sustainability? How can we draw on diverse forms of knowledge, such as western science and Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, to teach about sustainability?
These debates have been productive rather than paralyzing, as shown by the staying power of sustainability as a focus of academic and international discourse and policy making over the past four decades. In the process, people have developed a variety of models or frameworks for sustainability, which are summarized in these teaching slides that you can use to introduce the concept to students (or these slides specifically for Engineering students). Teaching these approaches to defining sustainability, or your preferred approach, or your discipline’s approach, is therefore the first step toward educating students about and for sustainability.
Integrating Sustainability into a Course
Prepare your Course
- Start with a learning outcome: what do you most want students to learn about sustainability as it relates to your course? Try putting the word “sustainability” into one or more of your existing course learning outcomes, lesson plans, or modules. How would that allow you to relate what you already teach to sustainability? If you’re in a position to create a new course, try putting “sustainability” into the title of a course in your discipline.
- Draw on your resources: SCU’s Center for Sustainability website provides a wealth of teaching resources for faculty about integrating sustainability across the curriculum, including ideas for learning outcomes, lesson plans, projects that engage students in strengthening campus sustainability, and a curriculum repository with lots of SCU teaching examples.
- Earn a stipend for your work: take one of SCU’s convenient, online summer curriculum development workshops to get feedback on your curriculum and teaching methods, and submit your revised or new course curriculum to get a stipend.
Engage the Students
- Teach the concept: Adopt or adapt the slide decks for faculty in engineering or other disciplines to introduce one or more models of sustainability that you will have students use in your course. Tell the students why you have selected a sustainability focus for a specific activity, unit, or the course. Will it help them respond to major challenges in the world, prepare them for careers in their profession that will grapple with these issues, and/or help them understand themselves and their world differently?
- Design experiential and reflective learning opportunities:
- Understand students’ context by asking them what they see as the major sustainability challenges relevant to your course, what students know about these issues, and what students want to learn.
- Create relevant opportunities to learn actively in class, in a community project, or on campus (through one of our many sustainability programs or events or campus operations, at the Forge Garden, or by analyzing campus sustainability data, or other applied projects).
- Create assignments in which students apply concepts and methods from your course to analyze, reflect, or design a response or a solution in response to these learning experiences.
- Deepen your understanding: If you’d like to learn more about teaching the major sustainability competencies, see Global Council for Science and the Environment (2024) and Raphael and Young (2025). To learn more about designing transformative sustainability pedagogy, read about the Head-Hands-Heart model (Sipos, Battisti, and Grimm, 2008), and Heather Burns’ model of sustainability pedagogy (Burns, 2011; Burns, Kelley, and Spalding (2019).
Additional Resources
SCU Center for Sustainability - Academics
SCU Environmental Justice & the Common Good Initiative
SCU Miller Center for Global Impact
References
Burns, H. (2011). Teaching for transformation: (Re)designing sustainability courses based on ecological principles. Journal of Sustainability Education, 2. http://www.jsedimensions.org/wordpress/content/teaching-for-transformation-redesigning-sustainability-courses_2011_03/
Burns, H. L., Kelley, S. S., & Spalding, H. E. (2019, Dec.-Feb.). Teaching sustainability: Recommendations for best pedagogical practices. Journal of Sustainability Education, 19. https://www.susted.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Burns-JSE-General-Issue-Dec-2018-February-2019-PDF.pdf
Elkington, J. (1998). Cannibals with forks: The triple bottom line of 21st century business. New Society Publishers.
Pope Francis (2015). Laudato si’: On care for our common home. Vatican.
Raphael, C., & Young, S. (2025). Teaching sustainability competencies across the disciplines: A guide for instructors (2nd ed.) Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. https://hub.aashe.org/browse/publication/28588/Teaching-Sustainability-Competencies-across-the-Disciplines-A-Guide-for-Instructors
Sipos, Y., Battisti, B., & Grimm, K. (2008). Achieving transformative sustainability learning: Engaging head, hands, and heart. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 9(1), 68-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676370810842193
World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). Our Common Future, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. United Nations.
Page authors:
Chad Raphael and Veronica Johnson, SCU Center for Sustainability
Last updated:
April 21, 2026