Call for applications for the 2024 Teaching Sustainability Initiative
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TSI provided me with the guidance, vocabulary, and tools I needed to bring sustainability into my first-year writing course. It was great way to join the sustainability community on campus and learn from others with similar concerns about climate change and other sustainability issues.
| Visiting Lecturer in English
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Are you concerned about sustainability and wish you could integrate it into your teaching, but just don’t know where to start? The Teaching Sustainability Initiative provides funding and resources to redesign an existing course or design a new one with a sustainability focus. This program is intended to intentionally grow UIC’s sustainability course offerings to all students. Since its inception, its community has grown to 60 TSI Fellows and TSI-incentivized courses have reached over 3,000 students to deliver innovative sustainability curriculum. Cohorts are limited to twenty fellows and faculty from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.
How Does it Work?
The TSI begins with a one-day workshop in May that provides faculty from all subject areas with an overview on how to amend and/or create curricula to include sustainability concepts. The workshop explores how we can meaningfully integrate sustainability – broadly defined – into UIC classrooms and provides access to a network of experienced instructors who provide assistance and feedback to formulate a dynamic syllabus and curriculum.
The fellows then have the summer and fall semester to create or revise their syllabus and/or other materials. Some instructors test out their TSI courses in the fall semester, while others may spend the semester working out the details for a spring course. Then, in December, the fellows reconvene for another day-long session where they share what they’ve been working on and what they’ve learned from the process.
Testimonials
After a successful 2023 TSI cohort wrapped up last December, fellows shared some of their insights from the program. Theja Tulabandhula, Assistant Professor of Business Analytics, said that one of his biggest takeaways was that “I learned how equally important the social and economic aspects of sustainability are, in addition to the environmental aspect.” He suggested that it was valuable to “learn about the various sustainability-focused efforts on campus, including those by Planning, Sustainability and Project Management and the Chancellor’s Committee on Sustainability and Energy. These provide great practical examples of activities happening close to us and make teaching sustainability concepts in the classroom less theoretical.”
Heather O’Leary, a Visiting Lecturer in English said that “TSI provided me with the guidance, vocabulary, and tools I needed to bring sustainability into my first-year writing course. It was great way to join the sustainability community on campus and learn from others with similar concerns about climate change and other sustainability issues.”
What Does a Successful TSI Course Look Like?
Jennifer Olson, a Clinical Associate Professor in Curriculum and Instruction, modified her course, ED199: Study Abroad Seminar: College Success and Leadership in a Global Context. This course is connected to the First Year Flames Abroad Program, which engages incoming first year students with a study abroad program in Costa Rica prior to the beginning of their first academic semester at UIC. The students then enroll in ED199 in fall to build on their study abroad educational experiences, and support students in their transition to university life. Because the study abroad program is in Costa Rica, sustainability is a central topic of the study abroad program and course already. While in Costa Rica, students engage in university lectures and community projects focused on sustainability, eco-tourism, and global challenges brought about by climate change.
Reflecting on her experience, Jennifer said:
Through the TSI program, I developed a project-based learning opportunity that made strong connections to everything we learned about sustainability while in Costa Rica and made connections to sustainability here on campus. Students were introduced to concepts of global learning using Costa Rica as a case study, including intercultural competency development, sustainability, and environmentalism. During the fall semester, students continued their exploration of sustainability, with a focus on initiatives on campus and in Chicago. Students engaged in a semester-long project exploring global and local sustainability, reflected on Costa Rica’s sustainability strategies, and created strategies to apply knowledge and skills to collaboratively address global challenges. This project gave students the opportunity to build on what they learned in Costa Rica and create a bridge between their study abroad experience in Costa Rica and Chicago.
For more on this program, you can read the First Year Flames Abroad blog.
Apply for the 2024 TSI Cohort by March 15
The application form is now live and must be submitted by March 15, 2024. To learn more, visit the Teaching Sustainability Initiative page on UIC’s Planning, Sustainability, and Project Management website.
Applicants should save the date of May 9, 9am-1pm, for the TSI workshop.
For questions or comments, please email Christopher Anderson at canders8@uic.edu.