Students can often help to facilitate communication between disciplines and across campus units. Students engaged in sustainability and environmental projects and internships generally collaborate outside their major. Students may work with campus facilities units and with community partners. Among the many benefits of these student enrichment activities is that they help faculty to build their networks and help the institution achieve its goals for sustainability as well as improved student achievement.
This webinar presents two examples of student-centered programs and will include discussion of lessons learned and recommendations for enhancing collaboration at other colleges and universities. Students from each school will comment on how these experiences have enhanced their education.
The Geospatial Centroid at Colorado State University is a resource and service center in the main campus library that supports the learning and application of geospatial technologies across campus. As such, it provides a venue for students, researchers, and faculty to interact beyond disciplinary boundaries because the technologies are universal and spatial thinking can be applied anywhere. The Centroid's flagship initiative is our internship program where we provide students with the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects--ranging from alternative transportation to public health-- with both on- and off-campus entities. In this way, interns are exposed to fields entirely unrelated to their majors and often gain insight into their own subject areas from surprisingly unrelated sources. We have learned that students are the best "bridges" between disciplines and provide a means to coordinate across campus.
For the past 13 years, teams of students in the third year Ecosystem Management Technology Program at Sir Sandford Fleming College in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada, have presented posters and served as conference volunteers at the National Conference and Global Forum on Science, Policy and the Environment in Washington, DC, organized by the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE). The poster projects, completed in student teams, are a major project option for students in the Urban Ecosystems course during their fall semester. The students attend the NSCE conference as a mandatory element of the Ecosystem Health Course, which they complete in the winter semester. The students then, as an entire class, build on their experiences in DC to design and present a one-day conference at the end of the winter term, as the capstone project in the Ecosystem Health course.
The Ecosystem Management Program has been in existence for the past 24 years and has a rich history of producing top quality, environmentally minded graduates. Graduates from this program are sought after across the country (Canada) and in some cases around the world, partly because of the multi-disciplined, "systems thinking", and experiential learning approach to curriculum design and delivery.
For more information, visit: https://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/workshops/webinars/2018_2019/campus_sustain/index.html
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