AAC&U News | July/August 2005

Sustainability Initiative Transforms Emory’s Curriculum, One Course at a Time

Emory University is situated in Georgia's piedmont, a region of rolling hills and forests that lies between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic coastal plain. It is also situated in the sprawling Atlanta metropolitan area. Promoting understanding of these two environments--the natural and the built--is a primary aim of Emory's Piedmont Project, an innovative program that helps faculty incorporate sustainability and environmental issues into their teaching.

The Piedmont Project takes a decentralized, faculty-led approach to reform. Each summer, an interdisciplinary cohort of about twenty faculty participate in the project. They take an intensive workshop on sustainability, learn about piedmont ecosystems and local environmental problems, and ultimately develop new courses or course modules. Although the project may seem modest in scale, Emory is finding that it can nonetheless produce deep transformations--in the lives and pedagogies of individual faculty members as well as in the courses they teach.

A New Faculty Development Program

Peggy Barlett, a professor of anthropology at Emory University, helped to found the Piedmont Project five years ago. Up until then, Emory's sustainability initiatives had focused not on courses but operations--reducing campus energy use, encouraging alternative transportation, constructing green buildings. In 2000, however, Barlett saw a possible model for broad curricular reform in Northern Arizona University's Ponderosa Project, a sustainability program in which she was then participating as a guest. After returning from Arizona and finding enthusiasm for starting a similar project at Emory, Barlett teamed up with Arri Eisen, a biologist who directs Emory's Program in Science and Society, and launched the Piedmont Project.

Barlett and Eisen continue to lead the Piedmont Project today. Each year since its founding, the project has supported roughly twenty faculty as they develop new courses or modules for existing courses. This new course content is meant to help students learn about sustainable communities, local and global ecological problems, environmental justice, and related social, political, and economic issues.

A range of organized activities support the course development. The project begins after graduation in May with an intensive two-day workshop. At the end of summer, when the course development work is complete, faculty take a field trip, and they reunite again in the following spring to compare notes and reflect on their experiences. In addition to introducing participants to local environmental issues, such activities build a sense of community, creating new conversations among faculty from different disciplines.

Connecting to Place

According to Peggy Barlett, the connection between faculty and place fostered in the initial two-day workshop is the key to the Piedmont Project's success. Project participants--who, as academics, have typically come to Emory from other parts of the country--often lack a strong sense of rootedness. "We are in the piedmont of Georgia," says Barlett: "What does that mean?"

To help faculty answer this question, the workshops feature a series of "resource people," experts who give presentations on local environmental issues. One resource person discusses the ecology of the piedmont; one talks about the social and political dimensions of sustainability in Atlanta; another speaks about how sustainability issues bear on day-to-day campus life. These specialist talks are interspersed with group discussion, which Barlett says builds a "rhythm of hearing something and then going into small groups to talk about it, think together about it, brainstorm."

The project also connects faculty to place through hands-on learning. Both days of the workshop feature guided afternoon "woods walks" in which faculty "learn through smelling and feeling and walking through the forest," Barlett says. On one walk, for example, the group visits a small old-growth forest on campus, which contrasts with the second- and third-growth forests that predominate in Georgia's piedmont. They also learn firsthand about some of the threats facing piedmont forests, seeing how invasive species, soil erosion, and stream degradation affect local ecosystems.

Building a Greener Curriculum

Although the Piedmont Project is a relatively small faculty development program, its cumulative effect on undergraduate education at Emory has been significant. Each year, the new content developed by just one cohort of professors reaches from six hundred to one thousand students. Surveys of faculty participants reveal other promising trends: although faculty commit to changing only one course, more than half end up changing two or three, and three-quarters of faculty say that they incorporate more experiential teaching methods into their courses. Increased civic engagement and interdisciplinarity in the curriculum are other indirect results of the project.

The curricular changes spurred by the project vary widely and cut across disciplines. One English professor who participated in the project added an experiential component to his class on romanticism and natural history, requiring students to directly observe and write about nature. Other professors have designed courses that exploit the "hidden curriculum," or the incidental content of courses--for instance, students in one Chinese course write pamphlets about Emory's relationship to the environment as a way of improving their language skills. Some courses, such as those influenced by "green chemistry," address environmental issues directly through new laboratory practices and experiments. One chemistry professor has even developed an introductory class that teaches basic concepts in chemistry through the issue of global warming.

The Piedmont Project, however, also faces obstacles as it seeks to effect broad curricular change. While the project's participants typically represent a diverse cross-section of Emory's campus, they are still a self-selecting group--as, to some extent, are the students who choose to enroll in courses that address sustainability. And the program's own sustainability is not entirely secure: the project has only been funded on a year-to-year basis until now, although Peggy Barlett and Arri Eisen are currently searching for a permanent source of funding.

Despite such challenges, Eisen believes that higher education can and must be at the center of efforts to build a sustainable future. Environmental sustainability, he says, "simply cannot be addressed effectively without rich multidisciplinary conversation, investigation, experimentation, and action"--things that colleges and universities, at their best, can support. Moreover, campuses can provide a starting point for larger efforts to raise environmental awareness. "The Piedmont Project has made me realize that one thing that works is starting small and local," Eisen says.

Colleges and universities themselves, of course, also benefit from sustainability efforts, even apart from the curricular innovations. Campuses can draw strength from the sense of community and personal fulfillment that results from faculty development efforts like the Piedmont Project. "There are a lot of ways in which the university fragments us, and there's a lot of intellectual and personal nourishment in learning together," Barlett says. "The Piedmont Project, I think, reestablishes that joy of learning--that's part of why we got into this in the first place."

More information about the Piedmont Project is available on Emory University's Web site. An analysis of faculty experiences of the project can be found in an essay by Peggy Barlett that is included in Urban Place: Reconnecting with the Natural World, a forthcoming book from MIT Press. AAC&U supports campus sustainability efforts through a partnership with University Leaders for a Sustainable Future and through its advocacy of learning for a world lived in common.