Sustainability Undergraduate Certificate Learning Goals

1. Students will be able to identify, critically analyze, and propose solutions to the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability.

Knowledge

  • Students can explain and assess sustainability issues on all three sustainability dimensions using relevant concepts and frameworks, and develop appropriate solutions to associated sustainability challenges.
  • Students can evaluate the three dimensions on the individual level and collective level; local level and global level; as well as from an intertemporal perspective.

Skills

  • Students can apply scientific inquiry to the analysis of real-world sustainability issues.
  • Students can identify scientifically defensible data and empirical evidence and employ this data and evidence to develop rigorous arguments.
  • Students can effectively communicate their viewpoints and solutions through writing, speaking, and other forms of communication.

2. Students will be able to engage in systems thinking and practice so as to address the interrelationships among the three dimensions of sustainability.

Knowledge

  • Students can identify and explain interdependencies among the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability.
  • Students know concepts and possess the tools to represent these interconnections, and are able to consider the impacts of decision-making on systems.

Skills

  • Students can perform integrative and collaborative scholarship as well as hands-on problem solving with collaborators from different disciplines and fields.
  • Students can integrate knowledge and concepts from different disciplines, perspectives, and cultures to the analysis of sustainability.
  • Students can apply a holistic approach to the analysis of sustainability.

3. Students will develop the capacity for an engaged life in which theory, practice, and reflection are integrated in pursuit of a more sustainable world.

Knowledge

  • Students understand the role and importance of civic responsibility and service in the pursuit of sustainability.

Skills

  • Students have a sense of their own civic responsibility and can articulate their (professional and personal) role in contributing to a more sustainable world.
  • Students can put into practice sustainability related concepts and tools.