Finally, it would also be useful to include an assessment of the teaching methods and approaches in the courses, particularly the interdisciplinary, applied, and research courses, to move beyond an analysis of what is being taught to understand

how it is being taught. This approach would allow an assessment of whether sustainability in higher education is including the communication and strategic skills that are important for sustainability science, Selleck Quisinostat as well as bridging topics from natural and social sciences, which our disciplinary categorization system cannot capture. Further research could also investigate the teaching and learning approaches and the motivation behind program design in more detail, through in-depth interviews or surveys with core faculty, administrators, and students. Such an approach would be necessary to evaluate, for example, if and how each of the five core this website competencies for sustainability identified by Wiek et al. (2011) are being taught in each program. MK-8931 Continued research and alignment with practice in new program design and in program updates will be important to ensure that education in the rapidly growing field of sustainability lives up to its promising potential. Conclusions With the establishment of sustainability as a

recognized academic field, sustainability degree programs in higher education have emerged and likely will continue to rapidly proliferate. This study evaluated the state of sustainability degree programs by analyzing 54 sustainability programs Decitabine research buy in higher education based on the curricular structure, the breadth of the core courses, and the core course subject areas. While bachelor’s programs were, on average, more flexible than the master’s

programs, core courses made up the majority of both curricula. Both sets of programs showed a high degree of disciplinary variety within these core courses, which on average were drawn from six of the ten disciplinary categories we studied. However, they showed surprisingly little curricular coherence between programs with the identity, inclusion, and distribution of core courses in these disciplinary categories within the curricula. In fact, there was no single disciplinary category present, or subject offered within any disciplinary category, in all programs. This lack of consistency in curricular content is a potential cause for concern and suggests that different programs in sustainability are taking different approaches to curricular content, with no core set of disciplines or subjects that are universally recognized as essential to sustainability degree programs, in contrast with the integration of natural and social sciences proposed in the literature.