Elon Law Assistant Professor Caroleen Dineen is one of eight faculty members selected for an Elon University program that supports professors interested in incorporating or enhancing a focus on sustainable principles and practices in their courses.
An Elon Law professor is developing an Environmental Justice course to potentially offer during the 2021-22 academic year through a university program that encourages faculty to emphasize sustainability in their teaching.
Assistant Professor Caroleen Dineen is one of eight professors from across the university selected this fall for the Sustainability Faculty Scholars Program.
Now in its 12th cycle, the program identifies, supports, and recognizes faculty who are interested in incorporating or enhancing a focus on sustainable principles and practices in their courses. Scholars are provided with support for course development, including relevant sustainability resources and pedagogies.
A legislative staff attorney and attorney in private practice prior to beginning her teaching career in legal education, Dineen worked on a variety of environmental and land use projects and regulatory and development proposals at the federal, state, and local levels.
“As a new faculty member at Elon Law, I want to continue to build opportunities for students to learn about environmental sustainability and the many legal and policy issues associated with that topic,” she wrote in her application to the program. “Common principles of environmental law and environmental sustainability include ensuring that land use development and natural resources use must be planned to ensure sustainability and balancing of the burdens and benefits.
“The Environmental Justice course I plan to propose will explore these concepts and simulate the work of lawyers incorporating environmental sustainability principles in legal and policy environmental, land use, and natural resource considerations associated with proposals and legal issues.”
Each cohort of Sustainability Faculty Scholars learn together from a series of workshops that focus on sustainability, relevant pedagogies and syllabus design, including presentations from returning scholars. Additional activities include field trips, lunch-and-learns and other planned programming.
“We saw a robust response from across schools in this application cycle and we are thrilled to have such a disciplinary-diverse cohort of faculty,” Associate Professor Samantha DiRosa, the university’s Faculty Fellow for Sustainability, said in her community announcement of the new cohort. “It truly requires a multidisciplinary effort to work on the daunting and complex environmental and social problems we presently face.”
Joining Dineen in the 2020-21 program are:
- Keshia Wall, Performing Arts
- Hwayeon Ryu, Mathematics
- Douglas Kass, Cinema and Television Arts
- Ryan Johnson, Philosophy
- Scott Hayward, Management
- Prachi Gala, Marketing
- Rob Elbitar, Marketing