Education

The NSF Center for Sustainable Polymers (CSP) in partnership with the Minnesota Corn Growers Association (MCGA) and the Minnesota Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) will be offering a FREE three-day workshop at the University of Minnesota for high school chemistry teachers on green and sustainable chemistry. The workshop was developed through the University of Minnesota MRSEC Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program. Applicants from across the Midwest are welcome. 

While applications are now closed for 2024, we encourage interested teachers to visit the website and learn more about the workshop for future years:

https://csp.umn.edu/green-chemistry-workshop/

This workshop is focused on equipping faculty across the curricula with best practices for embedding sustainability into their respective courses in a way that is engaging, transformative, and that supports existing course learning objectives. The workshop is based upon lessons learned at The College of Charleston (CofC) in Charleston, SC, where for four years faculty have engaged in a SACSCOC quality enhancement plan reaccreditation project, “Sustainability Literacy as a Bridge to Addressing 21st Century Problems.” This internally funded project is centered upon working with faculty to embed sustainability literacy into existing courses by providing ongoing trainings, workshops, and a year-long faculty cohort who work together on sharing best practices for teaching sustainability in a fall course, and then again in a spring course.

This workshop will present an overview of the project, it’s learning goals and outcomes, and an overview of assessment data (both qualitative and quantitative) from the project. Presenters will then work with those in the audience to:

• locate existing student learning objectives and help transition them to be sustainability focused
• dialogue about ways to present sustainability in an interdisciplinary way that also connects to a home discipline via effective sustainability teaching methods
• brainstorm capacity building opportunities to build faculty coalitions around embedding sustainability throughout the curricula.