2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

This panel discussion brings together people who have crossed that invisible yet real boundary between campus and community, by design, with their environmental studies courses. This boundary-crossing goes by many names — community based learning, service learning, experiential learning, and place based learning — which indeed have real theoretical differences, but in practice have similar learning goals and challenges. Particularly in the context of interdisciplinary environmental studies courses, these goals often include: helping students concretize global/abstract environmental issues through the lens of their immediate community; illustrating complexity through confronting a real-life interdisciplinary problem; exercising problem-solving skills; learning by doing; meeting a need(s) for a community organization or public entity; and building campus-community goodwill. Challenges we have encountered include: building community trust; maintaining momentum beyond any given semester; and allowing our students (and ourselves!) to struggle with unpredictability, unfinished projects, an unanticipated consequences. Panelists will draw upon their own experiences and empirical findings to critically reflect on what has and has not worked (pedagogically and logistically), both in the classroom and with the community. These personal and institutional experiences will serve as a conceptual guide for others interested in designing these types of courses and learning experiences. 

Key questions panelists will address include:

What are the challenges that arise when we make the community our classroom? 

How can we as instructors navigate the inherent unpredictability from having our students design and implement a project with a community partner?

Challenges & opportunities of community based learning: Using a ‘consultant’ model in a capstone course

Jane L. Wolfson, Towson University

The ‘consultant’ model, as used here, describes developing a capstone project based on receiving a request, from a professional in the community, for students to address a ‘real’ community-based problem; the professional is seeking the intellectual ‘person-power’ of the students to address an issue for which they need help.  A project so created is challenging for all concerned since 1) it can fall outside of the professor’s area of expertise; 2) students have had no input into the project selection and different students in the class have more or less interest in the topic; 3) the community partner needs to understand the limitations of the product produced.  It presents great learning opportunities in that 1) employees often don’t select the projects they are given by their employers; 2) interest and intellectual mastery can expand with exposure to new topics; 3) students realize the inherent complexity of local issues and the challenges of developing a suite of viable solutions.  Specific experiences will be discussed to illustrate these challenges, in addition to strategies I have used to address them.

Land Use Controversy and the Politics of Student Activism

Seaton Tarrant, University of Florida

This presentation presents a case study on the course Politics of Sustainability using content analysis of open-ended interviews with upper level sustainability students at the University of Florida. Students in Politics of Sustainability worked with Alachua Conservation Trust, recipient of the land conservation trust of the year award, 2013, to investigate the multiple communication strategies of these land developers, and produce and disseminate pamphlets to the public that attempt to more clearly communicate what is at stake, along with clarifying the interests of the different vested parties. They attended public hearings as observers and participants. They met with local stakeholders and community leadership to discuss what is going on behind the curtain of public image. The presentation will present two pedagogical responses to common challenges in the ES classroom. First, how to extend the impact of community work across semesters and student teams through online repositories and student responsibility for documenting and passing down workflow; I call this strategy “delayed collaboration”. Second, how to build up to the needed student skills in communication and organization through what I call “tiered experiential learning,” which presents students with multiple, increasingly complex learning environments over the course of the semester. Attendees of my presentation will leave with a better sense of how action research and experiential learning can empower students in environmental studies courses to make a difference in their communities, and they will better understand how to actualize the productive tension between learning and advocacy, through practicing traditional liberal arts skills in critical and reflective thinking.

Partnerships for Community-Engaged Learning in Sustainable Urban Agriculture; a Model for Strong Institutional Support

Julie A Maxson, Metropolitan State University

Metropolitan State University was founded in 1971 with a commitment to community-based learning at the core of its mission.  The university serves urban, primarily adult learners in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN.  The combination of the university’s location in a low-income neighborhood on St. Paul’s east side, and its established culture of community-engaged pedagogy has created a remarkable range of opportunities for fruitful partnerships between our nascent Environmental Science and Environmental Studies programs and local community organizations.  Our community partners focus on environmental quality, public health, and food security, all issues of interest to our students.

This presentation will focus on the role of institutional support structures in two new partnership projects.  In the first partnership, university students and faculty work with Urban Roots, a neighborhood non-profit organization that hires urban youth for summer internships in urban farming, from soil preparation to farmers market sales. Environmental Science students assess soil fertility and test for lead and arsenic contamination of urban soils, and present an informal soil science curriculum for the youth interns. The second project, which is much larger in scope, involves planning the renovation and re-use of a shuttered research greenhouse.  The goal of

this project is to develop a center for sustainable urban agriculture, with combined use for academic programs, educational outreach, and community organizations involved in urban agriculture.

Confronting the Boundaries of a Curriculum: Core competencies, program assessment, and the management of an MS program in Sustainability Studies

Keith McDade

Lenoir-Rhyne University recently established a new MS degree in Sustainability Studies at the Center for Graduate Studies of Asheville, NC.   This paper analyzes 1) core competencies developed by students, 2) community perspectives on student learning, and 3) reflections by faculty on the extent to which the program, now in its third year, is meeting its objectives.  The MS program combines courses in sustainability science with business decision-making, economics, public policy, sustainable energy and material use, environmental policy, research, and community planning.  At the center of the curriculum is a grounding in sustainability behavior, education and communication. The program requires a student-designed and -led Master’s project with a community partner that functions like a small experiment to advance sustainability.  Analysis of this MS program is conducted using i) tools designed for program assessment, ii) a series of observations, and iii) results from course project surveys.  The paper details lessons learned and ways in which the program is being adaptively managed, responding to feedback, changing conditions, and a constantly morphing field.  Also explored are challenges related to the assessment of the program at the system level.