Education Matters
Rooted in the Ground: Closing the Gap between Food Production and Food Waste
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tera Trujillo
The Institute for Sustainability's Food Garden and Compost Learning Center teaches students from a wide array of majors the importance of reconnecting with nature in an urban setting, as well as learning about seasonal agriculture and ways to combat food waste on campus. Our volunteers have assisted us in our efforts to get a bit closer to becoming a zero waste campus by learning how to divert around 48,000 pounds of pre-consumer food waste each year, which is then turned into compost, and finally is used to grow all of the fruits and vegetables in the food garden. It is critical now to continue educating students about sustainable food practices because many people in the surrounding Los Angeles areas do not have access to nutritious foods. This program gives volunteers (students and community members) a chance to become more self-empowered, and hopefully take this new formed knowledge and spread it to their communities.
Teaching and Learning Sustainability: Insights from Fifteen Years of Experience Teaching Community Development at a Pacific Island University with an Embedded International Field School in Bali Indonesia
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kirk Johnson, Alison Hadley, Mehraban Farahmand, Josealyn Eria, Ni Made Desa (Tutut) Perwani
Over the past fifteen years through the platform of a senior level undergraduate course at the University of Guam, a team of professors, researchers, and development practitioners have been striving to refine a pedagogic approach that helps students understand and appreciate the foundational concepts of community development, while also fostering a learning environment and an experiential program that empowers participants to actively engage in social discourses that contribute in positive and transformative ways to their communities. This paper is the culmination of this decade and a half effort and highlights, the philosophical foundations as well as the pedagogic approaches and insights of sustainability education. Employing a curriculum that focuses on both classroom work and international field school experience, students and professors as well as a number of other participants in the field explore such concepts and practices that are proving to be essential to a sound understanding of community development in the modern age. In this paper we explore how an experiential approach that grounds itself on a holistic curriculum that sees the student as an active participant in their own learning, on the power of both ‘doing’ and ‘being’, on the value of stepping out of the classroom to enhance theory, and on the power of cross-cultural exchange to broaden a world-view and deepen an appreciation of the recognition of the oneness and wholeness of the human family.
Toward Both Practical and Necessary Sustainability: Preparing Students to Work in Two Worlds at One Time
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Keith Mc Dade
The work of transforming our communities, our businesses, and ourselves toward more sustainability requires practitioners to, in a sense, live and work in two worlds at the same time: the world of the present and the world of the potential future. Education programs that prepare sustainability professionals need to emphasize both the practical and the visionary. Practitioners need to simultaneously work on reducing unsustainability while aiming to build the more sustainable world that we desire, recognizing that work to reduce unsustainability might slow down progress toward sustainability. To be competent in this arena, sustainability professionals need to develop translational skill sets that that allow them to bridge across disciplines, issues, time scales, and realities in ways that help society transition to more authentic and necessary sustainability while working on day-to-day realities. This requires attention in the development of a curriculum. This paper examines one US-based Master's degree program in Sustainability Studies to explore strategies and challenges for preparing sustainability professionals with these skill sets and sensibilities in mind.
An Arts-based Experiential Approach to Community Documentation and Revitalization of Indigenous and Drought-tolerant Crops
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Saori Ogura
Indigenous knowledge and traditional practices are critical tools in the quest to improve food sovereignty and to adapt to climate change. Tackling issues of nutritional insecurity in local communities requires support and documentation of traditional crops and farming practices. As a scholar and an artist, I work with Indigenous communities in the Indian Himalayas and in Mazvihwa, Zimbabwe, documenting Indigenous knowledge using arts-based tools to democratize my research methodologies. In my project, I support the revitalization of indigenous, drought-tolerant small grains by applying an experiential learning approach to engage communities through artistic practices. My project aims to build a collective community resource as communities reflect on their traditional skills and knowledge, reinforcing sustainable ways of knowing, being, and doing. An experiential learning approach will contribute to advancing local and worldwide sustainability by assisting communities in maintaining agricultural biodiversity and in improving their food sovereignty and climate change adaptability.
