402
M. Bardecki et al.
than allow unlimited increases in enrolments within the existing ones. A new program
proposal building on existing faculty interests supported the plan.
Ryerson’s MASc program in Environmental Applied Science and Management
(EnSciMan) started as an interdisciplinary initiative with faculty members from eight
schools and departments: three engineering departments, chemistry and biology,
geography, public health, urban and regional planning, and economics (Bardecki
and Pushchak 2014). The first students, in 2000, were members of the first cohort of
graduate students at Ryerson University. As of January 2018, EnSciMan had 94 member professors—amounting to 11% of the university’s faculty complement (including
representation from 27 different schools and departments in each of the university’s
Faculties). EnSciMan’s level of successful collaboration in bringing together a large
and disparate group of academics in a common cause of teaching, supervision and
research has been perceived within the university as a model of interdisciplinarity
(Bardecki 2015), and a basis for cooperation in a new undergraduate sustainabilityfocused program.
The Department of Geography has operated an undergraduate program within the
Faculty of Arts since the 1970s (originally a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Applied
Geography, now a BA in Geographical Analysis), and a master’s level degree in Spatial Analysis since 1990. However, over this period, Geography as a discipline has
seen challenging circumstances. With curricular change and a move to more instrumentalist education, the emphasis on the subject in secondary schools has decreased
with markedly lower enrolment in university Geography course offerings (Mansfield 2005). As a result, across the Ontario university system application numbers to
Geography programs are down and, with a lack of exposure to the discipline, course
enrolments are often challenging. The majority of the province’s universities do offer
undergraduate Geography programs (17 of 21), but students are now drawn from a
smaller pool. Strategies for attracting a new group of applicants had been a point
of discussion within Ryerson’s department for at least twenty years. Department
involvement with the creation and hosting of the new EUS program was seen as such
an opportunity.
3 EUS: Program Objectives
The need to reorient education towards sustainable development and that such initiatives need to be interdisciplinary in their approach was recognized in the Talloires Declaration’s (Principle 7) call for the development of interdisciplinary curricula to support an environmentally sustainable future (Wright 2002). The graduate
EnSciMan program had already gone a long way to breaking down the traditional
disciplinary silos which have been identified as barriers to the implementation of
sustainability-based programs elsewhere (Ralph and Stubbs 2014; Welch-Devine
et al. 2014). This provided some assurance from the start that the EUS program
development could draw on constructive relationships with academic units and indi-
M. Bardecki et al.
than allow unlimited increases in enrolments within the existing ones. A new program
proposal building on existing faculty interests supported the plan.
Ryerson’s MASc program in Environmental Applied Science and Management
(EnSciMan) started as an interdisciplinary initiative with faculty members from eight
schools and departments: three engineering departments, chemistry and biology,
geography, public health, urban and regional planning, and economics (Bardecki
and Pushchak 2014). The first students, in 2000, were members of the first cohort of
graduate students at Ryerson University. As of January 2018, EnSciMan had 94 member professors—amounting to 11% of the university’s faculty complement (including
representation from 27 different schools and departments in each of the university’s
Faculties). EnSciMan’s level of successful collaboration in bringing together a large
and disparate group of academics in a common cause of teaching, supervision and
research has been perceived within the university as a model of interdisciplinarity
(Bardecki 2015), and a basis for cooperation in a new undergraduate sustainabilityfocused program.
The Department of Geography has operated an undergraduate program within the
Faculty of Arts since the 1970s (originally a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Applied
Geography, now a BA in Geographical Analysis), and a master’s level degree in Spatial Analysis since 1990. However, over this period, Geography as a discipline has
seen challenging circumstances. With curricular change and a move to more instrumentalist education, the emphasis on the subject in secondary schools has decreased
with markedly lower enrolment in university Geography course offerings (Mansfield 2005). As a result, across the Ontario university system application numbers to
Geography programs are down and, with a lack of exposure to the discipline, course
enrolments are often challenging. The majority of the province’s universities do offer
undergraduate Geography programs (17 of 21), but students are now drawn from a
smaller pool. Strategies for attracting a new group of applicants had been a point
of discussion within Ryerson’s department for at least twenty years. Department
involvement with the creation and hosting of the new EUS program was seen as such
an opportunity.
3 EUS: Program Objectives
The need to reorient education towards sustainable development and that such initiatives need to be interdisciplinary in their approach was recognized in the Talloires Declaration’s (Principle 7) call for the development of interdisciplinary curricula to support an environmentally sustainable future (Wright 2002). The graduate
EnSciMan program had already gone a long way to breaking down the traditional
disciplinary silos which have been identified as barriers to the implementation of
sustainability-based programs elsewhere (Ralph and Stubbs 2014; Welch-Devine
et al. 2014). This provided some assurance from the start that the EUS program
development could draw on constructive relationships with academic units and indi-