Introducing the Trillium Student Research Initiative to Large Majors at Duke

The Trillium Faculty Workshop and the Trillium Student Research Initiative (TSRI) at Duke work to educate faculty about sustainability education and to incorporate sustainability in the syllabi of existing courses. These programs have interacted with many departments, but neither program has successfully recruited faculty members who teach large classes. Therefore, the goal of this project team was to find strategies to engage professors from the five most popular majors at Duke. This was done through assessing the current extent of sustainability education in courses at Duke and by discovering the barriers to participation in the TSRI for faculty in the largest majors. Data collected through interviews with professors, reviews of Duke resources, and external literature reviews were summarized into recommendations and presented to stakeholders at the TSRI.