As the field of Environmental Studies evolves, one of the newer focus areas for undergraduate courses relates to environmental justice and decolonizing knowledge, with approaches that vary in topics and teaching methods as discussed by Larkins and Singh (2024), Singleton et al. (2023), and Ward (2023). At each college or university, the courses offered shift, reflecting new research and ideas, depending on things such as the resources available (e.g., budgets, faculty, capacity); institutional priorities (e.g., specifically administrative support); and needs (e.g., degree requirements, student satisfaction). This paper reviews the course we created at SUNY – Environmental Science and Forestry that focuses on knowledge pathways in environmental studies and sciences. It explicates how we developed its content and customized it for our students at a STEM-oriented institution located in New York. We discuss what’s unique about the class—called Diversity and Knowledge of the Environment—and what it is accomplishing as a curricular innovation, including how the class quickly became an “exemplar” for State University of New York’s General Education requirements, when SUNY established a curriculum category called “Diversity: Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice.”
