Faculty Awards for Outstanding Sustainable Futures Assignments
In December 2021, five faculty were awarded honoraria and recognition by the College of Humanities and the Arts and SJSU's Office of Sustainability for their assignments contributing towards the Sustainable Futures Curricular Communities initiative. Please join H&A in Action and SJSU's Office of Sustainability in congratulating our winners!
| Daniel Lanza Rivers (Humanities) "Elemental Relations: Fire & Culture" (analytical scholarship) | |
| Chelsea Thompto (Art & Art History) "Building a More Sustainable and Accessible Internet: Lightweight Web Design with HTML and CSS" (visual arts category) | |
| Reiko Kataoka and Tridha Chatterjee (Linguistics & Language Development) "Animal Communication and Sustainability Project" (analytical scholarship category) | |
| John Delacruz (Journalism & Mass Communications) "Rip Curl: Community Activism for the Coast (The UX Phase, Rip Curl and Sustainability, The UI Phase)" (media arts category) | |
| Kohar Scott (Design) "Community Table Project" (visual arts category) |
Sustainable Futures is a thematic programming opportunity in the College of Humanities & the Arts at SJSU. During 2021-2022, a number of engaging, community-oriented workshops, performances, talks, and art exhibits address sustainable fire management, food scarcity, sustainable design, poetic renderings, sustainability and user interface design, climate visualization, poetic postcards, ecoacoustic series, and poetry as environmental justice. To support this engaging programming, after the success of the 2020-2021 Pandemic Pandemonium and in collaboration with SJSU's Office of Sustainability, we invited faculty in the College of Humanities and the Arts to create robust assignments and/or curriculum that engage with issues of sustainability.
Given the issues of sustainability prevalent in both the nation and the state of California, the question of what a sustainable future looks like is one we all must face, and that the arts, design, and humanities are some of the best avenues to explore.
These five faculty addressed the serious concern "How can you embed these pressing questions about Sustainable Futures into your curriculum?" through assignments in visual arts, media arts, and analytical scholarship. In addition to innovative pedagogy, these award-winning assignments implemented interesting instructional design by offering robust high impact practices to engage students in urgent concerns about sustainability in our world. Each of these assignments also expertly offer clearly written instructions, context for the assignment, clarity of outcomes/goals, evidence in its role in scaffolding for students around the larger goals of the course along with a clear rubric for either in person or online modalities.
Assignments are archived in King Library's ScholarWorks and available for revising, remixing, and reusing (as allowed by each Creative Commons license). Assignments have been added to our Examples of Innovative Assignments as well as the Office of Sustainability's Curriculum Development.
To learn more about SJSU's Office of Sustainability check out their events as well as upcoming events for Sustainable Futures programming from H&A in Action. In addition, see the extensive Lib Guide created by King Library.
Both Katherine D. Harris and Dean Shannon Miller are grateful to Debbie Andres and the Office of Sustainability for their support of this initiative.
Please note: If you revise or remix an assignment from any of these, please be sure to add a citation to your assignment in the same fashion that you would for any piece of scholarship. (See "Citational Practices" in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities)
-Author: Katherine D. Harris (Jan. 4, 2022 / updated Feb 1, 2022)
