Public engagement, effective communication, and fostering behavioral change are crucial for building a collective understanding of challenges, driving action, and ensuring a just and equitable future.
Gateway Academic Programs
Academic Programs
Penn State students can engage sustainability’s biggest challenges through their coursework, service, and applied experiences. In alignment with our Climate Consortium, the Sustainability Learning Gateway’s overarching themes provide pathways to learning about sustainability challenges, diving deep into the issues inside and outside of the classroom, and developing expertise that is personally, civically, and professionally meaningful. You can also search by your level, undergraduate or graduate. We have included these academic programs for one of three reasons. The program must:
- Require sustainability explicitly (Ex: Renewable Energy and Sustainability Systems, Energy and Sustainability Policy, or Sustainability Leadership);
- Provides a track or pathway for students to easily incorporate sustainability into the program (Architecture, Public Policy, or Ethics)
- Affords creativity or innovation to students to integrate sustainability into their program (Ex: Art, Integrative Sciences, or Music Composition).
There is a lot of information on these pages. Even still, we know special topics come up, individual faculty create sustainability-focused sections of courses, research experiences might be hidden somewhere, and new opportunities can emerge. To make the most of the Gateway and your sustainability journey, don’t hesitate to set up an appointment with an academic adviser or a trusted mentor for assistance. If you have questions or feedback about the Gateway, please email: sustainability@psu.edu.
Community, Environment, and Development (B.S.)
In addressing just and sustainable development, this major incorporates climate change, statistical research, economics, and more in this multidisciplinary porgram focused on communities.
Public Policy (B.S.)
For those interested in policy issues, politics, public administration, and related areas like policy analysis and policy advocacy, explore critical issues facing our communities, the nation, and the world.
Civic and Community Engagement
Extend your education beyond the classroom through engagement in socially meaningful public scholarship in community projects.
Sustainability Leadership
Promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability in personal and professional lives through studying systems thinking, change agency, ethics, and more.
There are no certificates in this category.
Geographic Information Systems
Prepare to design, manage, and use geographic information technologies in a wide range of professional fields.
Homeland Security, Geo-Spatial Intelligence Option
Become a leader for the field of homeland security in public health preparedness.
Psychology
Emphasis is placed on research, teaching, and professional career development with track options including social, developmental, and industrial/organizational.
This course engages multidisciplinary student teams in real-world, community-centered humanitarian engineering projects, integrating design, ethics, and contextual awareness to support community goals while critically examining the societal impacts of engineering practice with opportunities to practice sustainable design.
EDSGN454: Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship Field Experience
This course provides a hands-on, immersive field experience where students advance humanitarian engineering and social entrepreneurship ventures through field-testing, community engagement, and ethical decision-making in international contexts with opportunities for sustainable design.
AYFCE211N: Foundations: Civic and Community Engagement
This course engages students in learning and practicing theories and habits of civic and community engagement and public scholarship, focusing on building democratic capacity and sustaining participatory democracy by examining the role of citizens in shared governance through interdisciplinary perspectives from demography, political science, sociology, and psychology.
CAS222N: Foundations: Civic and Community Engagement
This course engages students in learning and practicing theories and habits of civic and community engagement and public scholarship, focusing on building democratic capacity and sustaining participatory democracy by examining the role of citizens in shared governance through interdisciplinary perspectives from demography, political science, sociology, and psychology.
CED152: Community Development Concepts and Practice
This course introduces students to the principles and practices of sustainable community development by exploring the interconnections between economy, society, and environment, and equipping them with skills to analyze, collaborate, and influence development strategies through real-world case studies and team-based decision-making.
CED309: Land Use Dynamics
This course uses economic analysis to examine land use and land use policy, considering how the spatial configuration of landscapes changes in response to changes in land prices, population growth, human preferences, the environment, markets, and institutions.
CED375: Community, Local Knowledge, and Democracy
This course explores the dynamics of community decision-making by examining citizen-expert interactions, participatory processes (e.g., in sustainable efforts), and methods for resolving complex public conflicts, with an emphasis on local democracy, ethical considerations, and the interplay of local and expert knowledge.
CED417: Power, Conflict and Community Decision Making
This course examines how culture and institutions influence human behavior, interdependence, power dynamics, and conflict, providing students with analytical frameworks to understand collective action (e.g., for sustainable efforts), public choice, and community decision-making.
EARTH111N: Water: Science and Society
This course examines the scarcity and distribution of Earth’s freshwater, focusing on water’s scientific properties and the political, economic, and environmental conflicts over water resources and quality, with a focus on the Western U.S.
EDSGN453: Design for Developing Communities
This seminar series prepares students to design sustainable, user-centered humanitarian engineering and social entrepreneurship ventures by emphasizing systems thinking, context-driven design, and integrated strategies for resource-constrained developing communities.
EME466: Energy and Sustainability in Society
Students in this course identify, organize, execute, and reflect on a local issue related to energy, the environment, or sustainability with particular emphasis on policy-based solutions.
ENGR451: Social Entrepreneurship
This course teaches students to develop sustainable business models and implementation strategies for social ventures that create positive social impact across diverse global regions, using case studies and multidisciplinary teamwork.
GEOG2N: Apocalyptic Geographies: How can we prevent the end of the world?
This course examines diverse apocalyptic visions from the humanities and popular culture to critically analyze and connect them with contemporary global social, ecological, and economic challenges, fostering interdisciplinary thinking to imagine alternative futures.
GEOG30N: Geographic Perspectives on Sustainability and Human-Environment Systems
This course explores the complex interactions between humans and the natural environment through geographic theories and methods, emphasizing how social, economic, and ecological processes across local and global scales shape sustainability, resource conservation, and responses to climate change.
GEOG40: World Regional Geography
This course explores global political, economic, social, and environmental changes by examining regional physical systems, cultures, economies, and challenges through geographic concepts like scale, place, and human-environment interaction to understand both global connections and regional differences.
GEOG123: Geography of Developing World
This course examines patterns of poverty in poor countries, explores conventional and non-conventional explanations with a focus on solutions using case studies of specific regions.
GEOG124: Elements of Cultural Geography
This course examines how cultural processes and social identities like race and class interact with geographic concepts such as landscape and place, exploring human-environment relationships and issues of plural societies, economic development, population growth, and settlement in non-Western contexts.
GEOG436: Ecology, Economy, and Society
This course explores the complex relationship between economic development and environmental sustainability by examining key concepts like equity, poverty, fairness and community empowerment, using case studies to analyze natural resource management and sustainable development at a macroeconomic level.
GEOG220: Perspectives on Human Geography
This course introduces the broad scope of contemporary human geography by exploring how cultural, economic, political, and environmental interactions shape geographic processes through diverse global and U.S.-based case studies.
GEOG230: Geographic Perspectives on Environment, Society, and Sustainability
This course explores the interconnectedness of social and ecological systems worldwide, using an interdisciplinary geographic approach to critically examine environmental challenges (e.g., climate change, genetically-modified food, over-consumption, disease, and environmental service provision), sustainability concepts, and human responsibilities for fostering equitable and sustainable futures.
GEOSC402Y: Natural Disasters
This course will provide an in-depth, hands-on study of both the physical processes of natural hazards, the human systems designed to minimize their impact, their geography, and their impact on societies worldwide.
GLIS101N: Globalization
This interdisciplinary course introduces global studies by examining globalization’s impact on identity, society, technology, environment, human rights, and conflict through diverse humanities and social science perspectives.
HIST109: Introduction to U.S. Environmental History
This course explores the major themes of U.S. Environmental History, examining changes in the American landscape, the development of ideas about nature in the United States, and the history of U.S. environmental activism.
HIST110: Nature and History
This course offers a global historical overview of human-nature relationships, emphasizing how environmental changes, resource use, and scientific ideas have shaped human history and contemporary environmental challenges.
HIST453: American Environmental History
This course covers the history of the ways Americans have used and thought about the environment since 1500.
METEO122: Atmospheric Environment: Growing in the Wind
This course explores how atmospheric processes, particularly energy, temperature, moisture, pressure, and wind, affect ecosystems, weather, and climate, emphasizing the role of solar energy distribution and human impacts on atmospheric conditions.
PSYCH419: Psychology and a Sustainable World
This course examines psychological dimensions of humans’ connection to the natural world, causes of human contributions to environmental problems, and psychological approaches for encouraging sustainable behavior.
RPTM300Y: Tourism and Leisure Behavior
This course explores the motivations, impacts, and sustainability challenges of tourism from a global perspective, examining its sociocultural, economic, and ecological effects on host communities and visitors, while emphasizing strategies for sustainable tourism development.
SOC5: Societal Problems
This course introduces students to the ways that sociologists seek to understand social conditions, events, and behaviors that people think of as “social problems” that need to be solved (e.g., poverty, crime, inequality, violence, environmental change).
SOC450: Justice and the Environment
This course considers notions of justice in relation to environmental philosophy, environmental movements, and general environmental concerns.
SUST150N: The Science of Sustainable Development
This course examines the interdependence of human society and the environment, exploring scientific principles and sustainable solutions to global challenges like ecosystem conservation, the water-food-energy nexus, and urbanization to promote environmental protection, economic growth, and social equity.
CED410: The Global Seminar
This course explores critical global sustainability and environmental issues through international collaboration, emphasizing trade-offs, policy, and diverse perspectives via case studies and virtual teamwork with students worldwide.
GEOG494: Research Project in Geography
This course provides an avenue for supervised student activities on research projects identified on an individual or small-group basis.
GLIS102N: Global Pathways
This course introduces five key global issues (conflict, health and environment, culture and identity, wealth and inequality, and human rights) exploring them through diverse humanistic and social scientific perspectives to prepare students to understand and engage with complex global challenges.
RPTM330: Adventure-Based Program Leadership
This course will focus on the philosophy, leadership techniques, ethics, and current and sustainable practices in the area of adventure-based programming.
STS47: Wilderness, Technology, and Society
This course examines the impact of developments in science, literature, and art on changing attitudes toward nature, the consequences for conservation, preservation, environmental ethics.
STS100: Science, Technology, and Culture
This course surveys the historical and cultural development of science, technology, and medicine worldwide, using humanities and social science perspectives to explore their societal impacts and evolving roles across time.
SUST242N: Issues in Sustainability
This integrative course explores sustainability as both a humanistic and social issue by analyzing how political, cultural, and rhetorical forces shape environmental values, actions, and narratives through diverse texts, field research, and critical discourse.
STS200: Critical Issues in Science, Technology, and Society
This course provides an overview of interactions between science, technology, and society from social sciences and humanities perspectives.
GEOG430: Human Use of Environment
The major objective of this course is to help geographers, earth scientists, and other professionals to develop an awareness and appreciation of the multiple perspectives that can be brought to studies of human use of the environment and of the ways in which resource-management decisions are made in human society.
RPTM320: Recreation Resource Planning and Management
This course introduces the management and planning of outdoor recreation resources in the U.S., focusing on user behavior, agency roles, environmental impacts, and tools for sustainable recreation resource use and visitor experience.
SOILS422: Natural Resources Conservation and Community Sustainability
This course provides practical knowledge of community and natural resource conservation by integrating soil, water, air, plants, animals, and humans to develop sustainable land-use practices, best management strategies, and a strong sense of place for enhancing community and ecosystem health.
EARTH/SCIED112: Climate Science for Educators
This introductory, multidisciplinary course prepares prospective K-6 teachers to understand Earth’s climate system through evidence-based scientific concepts and practices, emphasizing model development and applications for effective climate science teaching.
RPTM430: Environmental Education Methods and Materials
This course teaches methods and materials for developing, implementing, and evaluating environmental education programs in formal and non-formal settings, with practical experience at Shaver’s Creek and a focus on place-based pedagogy and resource access.
GEOG333: Human Dimensions of Natural Hazards
This interdisciplinary course introduces natural hazards by examining the physical events and their social impacts, emphasizing how human vulnerability and risk shape the consequences of hazards while developing students’ communication skills.
