{"id":2539,"date":"2013-03-03T07:44:22","date_gmt":"2013-03-03T14:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=2539"},"modified":"2013-10-31T08:37:01","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T14:37:01","slug":"a-meditation-on-universities-interdisciplinary-teaching-and-sustainability-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=2539","title":{"rendered":"A Meditation on Universities, Interdisciplinary Teaching, and Sustainability Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many institutions of higher learning, the University of Denver is committing resources to greening our campus and encouraging teaching and research on sustainability. We have a Sustainability Council<\/a>, a Sustainability Minor,<\/a> and a nascent Center for Sustainability.\u00a0Because of my interest in urban sustainability\u2014and to mark the 100th<\/sup> post of this humble blog\u2014I thought I\u2019d reflect a bit on what\u2019s happening on my campus and where we\u2019re going.<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a><\/p>\n

The catalyst for this essay was a recent panel discussion about sustainability\u00a0initiatives on campus. Sponsored by the Sustainability Council, the event kicked off a series of cross-curricular dialogues about sustainability-focused teaching and research at DU. The panelists were from a variety of traditional academic units and professional schools (e.g., Law, Social Work, and International Studies). \u00a0The goal was to encourage discussion across disciplines and identify cross-cutting themes for future events, given sustainability\u2019s inherently interdisciplinary character.<\/p>\n

The event was both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring, because of the good work on sustainability that\u2019s taking place within the academic units (e.g., on human-animal connections<\/a>, business ethics and sustainability<\/a>, global health<\/a>). Depressing, because a common note struck by speakers and audience members alike is how hard it is to do substantive interdisciplinary team-teaching (i.e., something more than the typical dog-and-pony show) about any<\/i> topic across academic units at DU. \u00a0Indeed, this was the main takeaway message of the event. The obstacles are structural, relating to the demands that individual units make on their faculty but also\u2014perhaps more importantly\u2014to the system for crediting team-teaching across units. Several participants noted that faculty with interdisciplinary teaching interests have to work in the \u201cinterstices\u201d of what, at DU, is a very traditional academic structure. \u00a0This certainly can produce some good results, as the panelists demonstrated.\u00a0 But a scattershot approach is no substitute for a broader institutional commitment that would better value this work and perhaps make DU more competitive in attracting top-flight faculty and students having interests in sustainability.<\/p>\n

Academic territoriality is another serious obstacle.\u00a0 Several years ago my colleagues within the arts, humanities and social sciences sought to create an Environmental Studies program. \u00a0They had a fully-justified proposal, courses ready and waiting, and participation pledges from faculty in a critical mass of departments. But the proposal was squashed because academic deans feared competition that would draw off students from the already established Environmental Sciences<\/a> program. We’re trying again this year to get something going in the area of Environmental Humanities<\/a> or Eco-Humanities.\u00a0 However, the ancient survival impulse to claim and protect turf is apparently still alive and well on campus. \u00a0Last year DU\u2019s Department of Geography received approval to change its name to the Department of Geography and The Environment<\/i><\/a>. \u00a0It’s not clear how this was accomplished; it could be that all it took was submission of a self-interested request to the university’s Board of Trustees, a governing body that’s un-populated by professional scholars. At any rate, this is astonishing stuff because I thought we were beyond seeing the \u201cThe Environment\u201d as an object of study to be owned by particular academic departments and divisions.\u00a0 It also runs counter to the widespread recognition that sustainability\u2014as something that\u2019s intimately wrapped up with \u201cThe Environment\u201d\u2014is an inherently interdisciplinary concept. Anthropologists sometimes get territorial about the study of \u201cCulture\u201d, but I think we\u2019re smart enough to realize that \u201cCulture\u201d is a complex phenomenon on which multiple disciplines can shed bright light. \u00a0\u201cThe Environment\u201d is similarly complex, beginning with the fact that it is cognized and used differently depending on cultural context and history.\u00a0 Any comprehensive understanding of human-environment relationships and, certainly, any effort to specify sustainable \u201cbest practices\u201d for managing human-environment relationships requires exposure to theories and methods that span the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.<\/p>\n

\"2<\/a>

Phoenix: A Model of Unsustainable Urbanism?<\/p><\/div>\n

Promotion and tenure criteria can also impede the development of interdisciplinary teaching and research. Like many \u00a0institutions, a \u201cstar\u201d mentality rules at DU, with the single-authored monograph and peer-reviewed journal article serving as coin of the realm. \u00a0The quest for star status can produce a certain insularity.\u00a0 Over the last 25 years I\u2019ve seen some very fine collaborative<\/em> scholars and scientists leave the university because they ran afoul of the star system for evaluating faculty talent (for a particularly egregious case, see here<\/a>). Others have left because of academic climate issues, like the particularly talented ecologist who, at a York University (Toronto) workshop on comparative urbanism<\/a> in 2008, riveted a roomful of participants with a discourse on the importance of wildlife corridors to sustainable urban environments.\u00a0 Stories like these relate to the challenge of building a faculty for 21st<\/sup> century interdisciplinary work on sustainability.\u00a0 I\u2019m not convinced that my institution knows how to meet that challenge, nor thought very much about it. Having star academics (whatever that means) in the fold is important, but so too is having the team-players who, because of their presence, make the whole much greater than the sum of its parts.\u00a0 And it seems that holism and balance in all areas of academic life is what any institution looking to gain street cred in the area of sustainability should be aspiring to achieve.<\/p>\n

Even the structure of the curriculum itself can hamper efforts to teach about sustainability.\u00a0 One place in DU\u2019s curriculum where team-teaching about sustainability might flourish is our Common (General Education) Curriculum<\/a>.\u00a0 The \u201cAdvanced Seminar\u201d piece of that curriculum invites interdisciplinary and experimental courses.\u00a0\u00a0 However, the established requirement for these upper-level courses is that they be writing<\/i> intensive.\u00a0 This can work against courses with sustainability themes that might be better taught with pedagogies that are field or lab intensive like, say, a course on urban permaculture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"4<\/a>

Salt Lake City: The Next Big Thing for Modeling Sustainable Urbanism?<\/p><\/div>\n

The parting shot to the Sustainability Council\u2019s panel \u00a0discussion was a comment from one participant who declared that DU is positioned to do some \u201camazing stuff\u201d in the area of sustainability.\u00a0 I completely agree, but I don\u2019t see how we can do this stuff without some financial and academic restructuring. \u00a0How hard can it be to produce a budgetary and credit-allocation model that actively supports interdisciplinary team-teaching across the traditional units and<\/i> the professional schools?\u00a0 Or, to structure a curriculum that allows pedagogy\u2014whether writing-intensive, field-intensive, lab-intensive, performance-intensive, or some other intensive\u2014to follow subject matter and course goals rather than being stipulated a priori<\/i>?\u00a0 Or, to combine programs with sustainability emphases\u2014environmental science, eco-humanities, urban studies–under a single comprehensive umbrella?\u00a0 We don\u2019t have to go so far as to create a separate School of Sustainability Studies like they have at Arizona State University<\/a>, although the ASU model of academic structure is producing some really interesting teaching, research, and public outreach initiatives<\/a>. Something along the lines of the University of Utah\u2019s program in Environmental and Sustainability Studies<\/a> would do.\u00a0 This program brings together scientific, humanistic, historical, and cross-cultural approaches to understanding the human-nature relationship. However, it\u2019s not clear whether the University of Utah is doing better than any other institution in supporting interdisciplinary team-teaching or building a faculty for 21st<\/sup> century work on sustainability.<\/p>\n

\"3<\/a>

Denver: A Natural Laboratory for Evaluating Models of Sustainable Urbanism<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s probably not a coincidence that\u00a0western<\/i> cities provide the geographical setting for this progressive sustainability work.\u00a0 Phoenix is a favorite poster child for unsustainable<\/i> urbanism.\u00a0 But that makes it an exquisite natural laboratory for thinking about, and testing, ideas about how to do things differently.\u00a0 Salt Lake City is currently poised to get some run as a model of urban sustainability given that the Congress for the New Urbanism<\/a> meets there later this year.\u00a0 If some CNU leaders have their way<\/a>, we could soon be talking up the 21st<\/sup> century relevance of 19th<\/sup> century Mormon town planning<\/a>.\u00a0 Denver has accumulated plenty of credibility as a place to watch<\/a> for trying out different approaches to creating sustainable urbanism.\u00a0 It\u2018s a shame that Denver\u2019s university is not leveraging our faculty talent and unique location to create the amazing program in sustainability studies that, given a little structural and paradigmatic change, lies well within our reach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many institutions of higher learning, the University of Denver is committing resources to greening our campus and encouraging teaching and research on sustainability. We have a Sustainability Council, a Sustainability Minor, and a nascent Center for Sustainability.\u00a0Because of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[6,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-denver-urbanism","category-sustainability","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-EX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2539"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3123,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539\/revisions\/3123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}