The concept of sustainability can seem remote, abstract, and irrelevant for many specializations at MIIS and many professions. Think of it as your best professional practices and how to mobilize and use professional skills, means and resources, and how to define and reach the goals of your professional field. Our class invites you to reflect and study your own professional practices, to identify the standards, objectives, means of action, limits and contraints of your profession, and how to work with other professionals from different horizons and profes-sional sub-cultures. There are also common practices or points of convergence across professions, which we will examine.

Therefore our class is structured in four parts. First, we study the economic, social, and environ-mental core (or ingredients) of sustainability as it is generally understood. These common factors can be articulated as STEEP (social, technological, economic, environmental and political) factors. This introduction will help you widen your views, structure your own criteria, and identi-fy the organizational dynamics for your profession or specialization. Second, you will examine (in groups of professional practice) the standards, best practices and objectives, defined by your professional organizations, and articulate and communicate them in ways that are understandable for stakeholders with other professional sub-cultures and language. Third, we will examine sev-eral case studies of successful and of failed policies, to see how sustainability (as your profession understands it) can be promoted, and what circumstances limit or undermine it. Each group of professional practice (students in IEM, in IEP, in DPP, in NPTS, etc.) will work on the case stud-ies together. And then, we will return to a more general view, a synthesis of sort to identify and articulate the common factors of excellence and sources of constraints across your various profes-sions professions, since no profession operates in isolation, in a silo, but in complex networks of very different stakeholders.

Assignments: 1) general preparedness and participation, 2) one home essay (or any form of writ-ten reflection applicable in your field like a policy memo, a white paper, etc), 3) two class exams, 4) one professional presentation (on the standards and objectives of your profession or on your case studies or a mix) or other profession-specific form of group communication on these topics (e.g., creating a video, a podcast, etc.).

Required language proficiency: ACTFL Advanced Mid.

No textbook is assigned, we create our own reading list from the www and professional sources.