The webinar will explore ways of engaging students and faculty with university sustainability indicators and assessments, such as AASHE’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), suggesting that asking students to select their university’s key sustainability indicators can help them understand sustainability in more complex ways. The webinar will briefly review the learning opportunities shown by student- and faculty-led university environmental audits of the 1990s, and it will describe how systems thinking offers a theory and a process for choosing indicators that can be used in the classroom. The presentation draws from a “thought piece” published in Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences in 2017; it will report on how these ideas have been applied recently at Tulane in the course “Measuring Sustainability.”

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Presenter

Elizabeth Davey, Director of the Office of Sustainability, Tulane University Elizabeth Davey is the Director of the Office of Sustainability of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.  She helped launch the sustainability initiative at Michigan State University as a visiting professor in the late 1990s, then moved to New Orleans to take one of the early full-time positions in campus greening. She has served in this position for almost 20 years, working on sustainability in almost every dimension of university work and life. She has an A.B. in English with a certificate in Environmental Studies from Dartmouth College and an M.F.A./Ph.D. in American Literature from Cornell University’s Department of English.