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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to report on the Multidisciplinary Sustainability Education Project (MSEP) as a framework using sustainability-themed education modules to introduce students to the need for multidisciplinary approaches to solving twenty-first-century problems while retaining traditional course strengths and content. Design/methodology/approach -The MSEP uses sustainability-themed education models and a multidisciplinary approach to link courses across disciplines. Modules are identified by an overarching question with activities designed to address the overarching question from course-specific perspectives, resulting in students writing short technical reports summarizing their results. Students then read and evaluate technical reports from other classes, and complete a summary activity designed to connect perspectives from different disciplines. Findings -The multi-method assessment identified no loss or gain in discipline-specific learning; increased understanding about the characteristics of twenty-first-century problems, in particular those related to sustainability; and increased students' favorable perceptions of introductory calculus. Assessment of increased understanding of how different disciplines can work together to understand complex problems was difficult to measure due to limitations of a project-developed assessment instrument. Originality/value -This paper contributes to undergraduate sustainability education by describing a framework for connecting courses using sustainability-themed modules. By implementing an asynchronous manner where courses use materials from the project Web site and contribute materials to the Web site after implementing a module, it is easy to incorporate a module into existing courses, any educational institution's existing structure and across institutions. The framework's flexible design allows new courses from any discipline to connect to a module, allowing for multidisciplinary connections to grow over time.

This paper stems from work done by the authors at the Mathematics for Social Justice Workshop held in June of 2007 at Middlebury College. We provide a description of the Gini coefficient and some discussion of how it can be used to promote quantitative literacy skills in mathematics courses. The Gini Coefficient was introduced in 1921 by Italian statistician Corrado Gini as a measure of inequality. It is defined as twice the area between two curves. One, the Lorenz curve for a given population with respect to a given resource, represents the cumulative percentage of the resource as a function of the cumulative percentage of the population that shares that percentage of the resource. The second curve is the line y = x which is the Lorenz curve for a population which shares the resource equally. The Gini coefficient can be interpreted as the percentage of inequality represented in the population with respect to the given resource. We propose that the Gini coefficient can be used to enhance students' understanding of calculus concepts and provide practice for students in using both calculus and quantitative literacy skills. Our examples are based mainly on distribution of energy resources using publicly available data from the Energy Information Agency of the United States Government. For energy resources within the United States, we find that by household, the Gini coefficient is 0.346, while using the 51 data points represented by the states and Washington D.C., the Gini coefficient is 0.158. When we consider the countries of the world as a population of 210, the Gini coefficient is 0.670. We close with ideas for questions which can be posed to students and discussion of the experiences two other mathematics instructors have had incorporating the Gini coefficient into pre-calculus-level mathematics classes.

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