Summary: Seneca's Sustainability Office hosts the Green Citizen Symposium every fall. It brings together innovators, business leaders, authors, and academics to share their experiences tackling global sustainability challenges. A Business professor asked students to attend one Symposium keynote session and create a video discussing the keynotes theme, which stakeholders were impacted and how it related to Sustainable Development Goals. The task required students to demonstrate their listening and critical thinking skills while examining how businesses engage in sustainability. For example, students learned about Canada’s plastic pollution problem and discussed ways businesses can contribute to the plastic solution, and finally shared how multiple SDGs were met.
Sample Learning Objective: Students will think critically about a keynote presentation and relate it to community stakeholders, including community, employees, customers and investors
Related Activity: Students attend the Green Citizen Symposium, thus bringing awareness to Seneca’s commitment to sustainability and exposing students to industry sustainability experts
Related Assessment: Students create a video verbally analyzing the keynote’s presentation
Related SDGs: Multiple SDGs depending upon the keynote topics
Resource: Green Citizen Symposium
Summary: In a cosmetic science course “Advanced Formulation”, a cosmetic science professor discussed “Trends in Cosmetics” in class from a sustainability perspective. They discussed the impact on sourcing ingredients, green chemistry principles, upcycling, water usage in manufacturing ingredients and products.
Sample Learning Objective: Students will review an online media resource to discuss trends in the cosmetic and personal care industry through a sustainability lens.
Related Activity: Search for an article that piques their interest and share their thoughts.
Related Assessment: Analyze “who is the target audience for the trend?” and how does it affect them and other audiences.
Related SDGs:
Resource: Cosmetics Design North America - Cosmetics Packaging, Industry, Manufacturers - Cosmetics Ingredients, Supply
Summary: A Seneca engineering professor hosted weekly “What’s the Deal with Steel” conversations based on sustainability articles about steel production. After a few weeks of discussions, students were asked to find their own relevant articles/videos and provide the class with guiding questions.
In the professor’s own words: “I started the conversation with the students, and we had regular class discussions. I also worked this topic into an asynchronous module, and we watched some videos about new technologies used to eliminate fossil fuels in the production of steel.”
Sample Learning Objective: Students will critically analyze the impact of steel production on the environment.
Related Activity: What’s the deal with steel? Discussion, debate and presentations.
Related Assessment: Informal Presentation – professor evaluates communication skills and familiarity with topic.
Resource: Five examples of sustainable engineering for the future
Summary: A Seneca professor asked students to reflect on a travel experience where they witnessed or experienced sustainable business practices and/or the environmental impact of tourism on a region. Students without travel experience were asked to reflect on their own values and goals as potential tourism/hospitality employees regarding sustainability and the types of companies they may want to work for that aligned with their personal values.
Sample Learning Objective: Examine the role of tourism companies in promoting sustainable practices in specific tourist areas.
Related Activity: Reflection task on Blackboard Discussion boards.
Related Assessment 1: In groups, students propose sustainable practices in tourism for regions of the world of their choosing.
Related Assessment 2: Conduct job searches in tourism/hospitality and analyze postings that incorporate sustainability. Share your analysis with the class.
Summary: A Seneca math professor actively attempted to incorporate examples of sustainability in place of the usual examples. Every day in class, the professor would introduce new concepts (ex. Derivatives, integrals, Rate of change, Rieman sums, etc.). When learning about these topics, students would first be taught the theory and mechanics of the new techniques and then would proceed to applying the mathematical concepts to “real-world” areas. To integrate sustainability, this professor consciously chose to select “real-world” examples from areas pertaining to sustainability. Here is an example of one such application.
Sample Learning Objectives:
Related Activity: Using Riemann sums, calculate and compare the total CO2 emissions for the U.S. and China from 1980 to 2015. What are the possible effects of these CO2 emissions on the Earth’s climate?
Related Assessment: Above activity could be completed and submitted or other Riemann Sums could be calculated using different sets of data. See example lesson plan.
Resource 1: Mathematics of Planet Earth
Resource 2: Sustainability Math
Note: This is an example from a First Year Calculus course, but any math class could take the data and adapt it to the mathematical methods being taught in the class (example Functions; Statistics, etc.)
Community of Practice: Facilitate a Curriculum Integration circuit (virtual or in-person) to generate small, yet effective, integration strategies faculty can incorporate into their course content or teaching practice.
Strategies
Deliverables
Back to top
is requesting access to a wiki that you have locked: https://employees.senecapolytechnic.ca/spaces/277/curriculum-integration/wiki/view/20998/examples-at-seneca
Your session has expired. You are being logged out.