Sustainability in a business context is a passion area for me. I love talking about sustainability and helping students to wrestle with the opportunities and challenges of considering business decisions from a sustainability standpoint. This passion clearly comes across to students. Plus, this was a course that I was able to design from scratch. Additionally, since it is an elective, students choose to take it. As a result, my ratings have consistently been around 4.5 or above. In comparison to the other courses I teach, by far I receive the most positive comments from students in this class. Below is a sample of comments received from students over the past four years (postponed class offering in 2021 due to COVID-19 as it is a highly experiential course):
- “Loved having Dr. Easter! You can tell she is really passionate about the topic of sustainability and really encouraged us to be open and learn more about it. I love the way she facilitated class discussions and didn’t require tests or quizzes. It really allowed me to focus on the material and cultivate my own thoughts and questions instead of memorizing book or lecture info. The field trips were a lot of fun! I’m excited to have her again in the fall.”
- “Business & Sustainability with Sarah Easter has been a phenomenal learning experience. Change happens with a motivation for a cause that effects more than just corporations and it was great to be able to learn how, as business people, we can change a business environment. This class expanded my perspective of sustainable business practices where I gained knowledge about our ability to sustain the environments we live in through first-hand accounts of business professionals.”
- “Loved the class. Dr. Easter made the class more enjoyable by finding creative ways to keep the class engaged outside of lectures.”
- “Easter did a phenomenal job at helping me learn such a loaded subject in such a short amount of time. I really enjoyed how she runs class and assigns homework and projects. I feel that all classes should be run this way, and that I have learned so much than I do when all I do is take tests. I absolutely LOVED this class and the professor who taught it.”
- “This class was filled with fun activities and very engaging with the information. Though it was a short course i really wish every teacher would take a look into the statistics of having such an active learning environment like yours. Glad i got to spend this week with you as my teacher, you were awesome!”
- “Great professor. Engaged the class well and brought up difficult but beneficial discussions. Very prepared and organized.”
- “Dr. Easter was prepared everyday for class and made this course interactive and truly easy to grasp. She made it fun to learn and made a 10-hour day go by quickly!!!”
- “Professor Easter was a very intriguing person that truly cares about sustaining the world. When a professor genuinely cares about a subject, then it makes the students care a little bit more”
- “This was an excellent course. I liked how the course was structure with the discussion work and the field trips etc. It broke the course up very well and didn’t make it seem as long.”
I taught this course first as a Maymester (May 2017) and then as a January short course (2018, 2019, 2020). Teaching a 3-credit hour course in such a condensed format has been a fun and creative challenge. I tend to emphasis hands-on learning and an interactive classroom environment in a full semester course. This condensed format provided me with even more creative license to integrate a variety of platforms such as field trips and guest speakers, which would be much more difficult to effectively integrate within an 80-minute classroom window. At the same time, I have had to learn how to effectively structure and time different activities in the course, particularly since I incorporate so many different guest speakers and visits to local organizations. This aspect of the course has improved over time as I have better learned how long different activities typically take.
A note about different viewpoints and practicing respectful engagement. It is very important to me that I work to create a learning environment where students feel they are free to form their own opinions about the sustainability-related topics being discussed in the course. In order to help foster this type of environment, below is an introductory activity students participate in and a corresponding list of “ground rules” that I verbally try and communicate to students in the first-class session in framing the course:
- Sustainability buffet activity: before students arrive, I lay out a wide variety of different pictures (that I utilize from the Apples to Apples Pictures: Big Picture game), company names, and common definitions of sustainability. As the first activity, I have students select two images/company logos/definitions: 1) the one that best communicates how they would describe sustainability and 2) the one that least describes how they perceive sustainability. I ask students to first share why they made their selections with their individual groups; then I ask each student to share one of their pictures/definitions and explain why they chose it.
- This exercise usually generates a lot of different ideas as to the concept and definition of sustainability; I use this as an opportunity to communicate the notion that sustainability can mean a lot of different things to different people.
- I then clearly communicate that this course is intended to expose students to a variety of different perspectives on sustainability. I also explain that, in doing so, my hope is that they will learn to critically reflect on different viewpoints in forming their own opinions about sustainability, not to regurgitate my own views on sustainability (as the professor).
- Next, I explicitly state that sustainability can often be a politically charged topic but that we are not going to make it so in this class.
- I then use this exercise as an opportunity to communicate the notion that it is very important to be respectful of different viewpoints and to take the time to learn from others’ opinions even if one disagrees.
I have found that framing the class in this way from the beginning helps students to feel at ease and to be receptive to the variety of course topics even when some of the guest speakers/videos make statements that are very politically charged.
Next Section: Innovations and Adjustments to Social Enterprise Consulting