SENV 342: SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

A Course Development Grant Request for

COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH AND SERVICE-LEARNING

Michael R. Edelstein, Ph.D.

Spring 1998

Current thought about the needed directions for a society that would fulfill its citizens, meet their needs in a satisfying manner and maintain the environmental conditions for long term survival has focused on the concept of sustainability. While sustainability must be considered at different scales, it is generally believed that the community is the most direct locus of sustainable experimentation, development and maintenance. While much has been written about the concept, we are just beginning to accumulate methods for achieving sustainability.

The course Sustainable Communities offers students at the Junior level in Environmental Studies and the related social and policy sciences an intensive course experience on the dynamics of creating and managing a sustainable community. As such, the course brings together the decision-making and management dynamics of the community, and other social indicators of health, with the ecological and economic health of the community, as well. Although the concepts and some examples in this course are global in nature, the field work will primarily involve the student in the processes integral to sustainability in their own home communities, on campus and in regional field sites visited during the semester.

As such, the course is a natural match to the Cahill Center’s initiative for Community- Based Research and potentially for Service Learning, as well. Sustainable Communities has been offered once at Ramapo, in 1996. That first offering of the course utilized a lecture/lab format where the labs consisted primarily of field trips to model sites for exploring efforts to achieve sustainability. However, subsequent refinements to the course removed the lecture/lab (6-credit) framework. It is now necessary to achieve a similar level of field experience within the approved four-credit time block, rather than the expanded lecture/lab framework. Furthermore, in rethinking the course, the decision was made to focus away from field trips toward field action and research. The class has not been offered since this change in focus was contemplated and course development effecting this shift has not as yet been done. As a result, support under this initiative would be welcomed toward the upcoming offering of the course in Fall 1998.

There is a need for students to be exposed to the social process inherent to sustainability, including group and organizational dynamics and decision-making. Simultaneously, students must become familiar with one of the several useful lenses for examining the topic. These include the ecological footprint model, whereby the extension of ecological dependencies of a given institution, community or region are examined in light of the carrying capacities of each resource base. The sustainability indicators approach selects a series of diagnostic characteristics of sustainability and sets out to measure just how well the target community scores. The action research approach to sustainability involves collecting data through a process of informing the transformation of the community to be studied toward sustainability. Regardless of the approach, students must engage the topic, not just hear it lectured about.

The course builds students’ observational and critical skills, their knowledge of how social decisions are made, their ability to shape and participate in those decisions, their ability to integrate learning to the point of being able to teach, their understanding of the consequences of current practice and the promise of alternative models of social action, their leadership skills, their ability to identify the ecological and social health of a community and to devise alternative approaches for correcting or avoiding unecological outcomes. The course is a studio in social and environmental design. It places the student in the role of visioning concrete steps that can be taken to approach a new direction for social, economic and ecological functioning at the community level. Students will not be designing buildings or other concrete structures so much as designing alternative relationships of natural and built environments, and social and economic and ecological practices. It uses community and region as the learning elements, both in observing current outcomes and the dynamics and processes that create these outcomes and, then, in erasing the board and drawing better and more sustainable images.

Educationally, the course builds off of direct practice that involves students in the context of defining and identifying the conditions within which a community moves toward sustainability. Practice, field and laboratory sessions are matched by lecture, discussion and student presentation components. The use of Service Learning placements (or an equivalent individual community exposure element) as a required part of course work is also contemplated. A portion of the class time will be used to debrief and compare observations of different communities encountered during student’s individual work, as well as directly in class experiences.

Because of its accessibility and suitability, the primary laboratory for the course is the campus of Ramapo College. It is contemplated that a book such as The National Wildlife Federation’s Ecodemia, which sets forth a series of campus indicators of sustainability, would be used to focus a class research effort to examine sustainability of the campus community. The research effort will combine the footprints, indicators and action approaches. In short, it will seek to study the campus and also actually facilitate the Ramapo community’s movement toward sustainability. Additionally, there is the potential for using Service Learning assignments to assure that each student is simultaneously gaining experience in the outside community, since the shortened time frame (compared to the lecture/lab format) will hamper the class having extensive off-campus experiences collectively. A key element of the planning allowed under this grant will be to design the optimal mixture between Community-Based Research and Service- Learning. Class will be a mixture of lecture and academic discussion of sustainability issues, the collaborative research effort, debriefing the research experience, and discussion of the reported community (perhaps Service Learning) experience. Whether there is time to use a full Service Learning approach in combination with the Community-Based Research approach is to be determined during the planning.

Hopefully, there is sufficient information here to understand the course development ahead and judge the appropriateness of this course for a grant under this initiative. If there are any questions, additional information will be provided.

Financial Request:

A Summer Stipend for Course Project Based Service Learning /Community Based Research development.

$2,200

Funding for Course Materials, Documentation, Measurement Equipment, Field Trip Costs and Guest Expert appearances. Note that the detailed budget will be developed as part of the summer project, since the exact nature of the research and project will determine the actual funding requirements.

$ 500

Total: $2,700