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responsibility and renewal
study, and as a multi-disciplinary specialty that grows from relevant perspectives in courses already offered by other departments. Currently, over 30 faculty members from as many disciplines are involved. Though courses in sustainability have been offered for several years, our Chancellor on February 19, 2010 officially added to the University roster its own distinct Sustainability Studies department. Also in February 2010, the UMass Dartmouth Office of Campus and Community Sustainability received a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor underwriting the creation of at least a dozen Master’s level sustainability courses. We expect a full Master’s level degree program to be in place by the fall semester of 2011. Our multi-disciplinary 18-credit Sustainability Minor was approved in the spring of 2007 and graduated its first students in spring 2009. A UMass Dartmouth staple sustainability course called “Topics in Sustainability” examines a single sustainability issue through the lens of five disciplines. Taught by five professors, the popular course is routinely filled. Topics courses have included focuses on Food; Consumption; Water; Coastal Zones; Perception, Representation and the World; the Carbon Cycle, and Urban Environments. Other Sustainability courses at UMass Dartmouth mix old and new courses; The Politics of Everyday Things, for example, looks at resource chains. At UMass Dartmouth, each of our seven colleges has faculty, staff, and students involved in sustainability research and coursework. Creating formal academic programs of study for degrees in sustainability is interweaving these researchers and professors in new forward-thinking endeavors. But we are also working to incorporate sustainability into the education of every student. One strategy is to bring discussions of sustainability into pre-existing required classes, and another under consideration is to add as a requisite for all students a topics course in sustainability.
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