Sustaining Education
Riparian Restoration and the Route Ahead: Grant Funding in a Collaborative Partnership with the U.S. Forest Service View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joshua Lenart
Utilizing the triple bottom line, this interdisciplinary study outlines a pedagogical method for guiding undergraduate environmental science and environmental engineering students through the research, analysis, and consensus-building stages of a formal feasibility study. In an effort to better coordinate student research on land-use and -development projects, this paper describes how to organize the various stages of research while critically analyzing how stakeholder input and resource conflicts are negotiated within rural communities. This approach strives to enhance meaningful collaboration between researchers and resource management organizations at local, federal, and international levels in order to bolster community involvement and responsible land-use planning. Centered around collaborative partnerships with governmental and nongovernmental organizations, this approach asks students to work collectively to compile an environmental feasibility study, which: 1) provides an economic analysis, 2) identifies grant funding organizations, 3) assesses stakeholder value(s), and 4) develops a community outreach and action plan. The particular example discussed herein details a partnership with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to analyze several proposed trailhead repairs, route closures, and riparian enhancements within a heavily-trafficked hiking area. This effort chronicles a holistic and highly-interactive teaching approach that better prepares students to communicate about the multidimensional challenges they see on a local level in order to address larger, more global challenges. Ultimately, this paper provides environmental resource educators with a toolkit for helping students learn to better balance the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of a project within a given community, organization, or ecoregion.
Current Status of the Texas Tech University Home Utility Management System View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brian Ancell
The utility infrastructure currently in place that supports global water and power usage presents several potentially serious issues. Surface and groundwater supplies can fall short of demand, a problem projected to become worse with projected climate variability and future population growth. Emissions from fossil fuel-based power generation and their increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations can lead to serious global consequences well beyond the climate itself (e.g. agricultural food supply, or sea level). Even with the continued development of renewable energy systems that harvest wind and solar power, centralized utility systems leave large portions of society vulnerable to natural hazards and attacks. In turn, a critical need exists to create utility systems that can mitigate these potentially disastrous societal, economic, and environmental problems. We have been testing a home utility management system (or HUMS) at Texas Tech University that can potentially provide the solution at a residential level. The HUMS is a decentralized utility model based on renewable resources that enables individual homes to produce a substantial portion of their own power (with solar panels, a wind turbine, and a residential battery) and water (through rain harvest and water storage). The utility system is integrated into a home computer that displays current power and storage levels and the expected future availability of water and power resources (through high quality probabilistic weather prediction data). Here we describe the current status of HUMS with a focus on the machine-learning residential utility use guidance aspect that will be evaluated in a social context.
Integrating Sustainability into Higher Education: A Tale of Challenges and Learning View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Björn Hassler
There is a widespread movement in higher education, where sustainability and the UN SDGs increasingly are becoming integrated into curricula. Such integration can be carried out in many ways, for example through development of new courses or modules, new programmes, seminars, workshops, or conferences. However, these integration paths are likely to be partial at best, primarily reaching already knowledgeable teachers and students. Therefore, we (chair and vice chair of the faculty board) initiated a comprehensive strategy at Södertörn University in Stockholm with the aim to have at least one general learning objective on sustainability in all programme plans. Because of the binding status of learning objectives in Swedish higher education, this we thought would ensure broad integration, while at the same time allowing individual programme boards to adapt learning objectives at the course level to programme specific considerations. However, despite being an initiative from two representatives elected by teaching staff, this initiative was heavily criticized for being “directed from above” and an example of “illegitimate steering not compatible with academic freedom”. After some turmoil in the teaching staff, the initiative was effectively buried. Reflecting afterwards on this experience, we think it is vital to have collegial and open deliberations on how to integrate sustainable development in higher education. Possibly even more important, academic freedom and societal responsibility needs to be discussed and problematised within academia to find common grounds and negotiated strategies.
New Approaches to Teaching Sustainability: Active8-Planet and Urban GoodCamp View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gregor Cerinsek
Recent global movements indicate a rapidly growing awareness, frustration, and eagerness of the European youth to actively engage in securing a sustainable future for all. Even though the need for a holistic, interdisciplinary, and cross-sector approach to sustainability has been increasingly recognized on research and policy levels, the trickle-down to higher education curricula and learning approaches has been slow. This paper critically examines two challenge-based, interdisciplinary, and multi-stakeholder approaches to teaching and learning in higher education that integrate people- and planet-centred development principles. In the Erasmus+ Active8-Planet project, co-creation activities occur in the “7+1 team projects” in which the groups of students, professors, industry professionals, and other relevant stakeholders collaborate and jointly develop concepts and interventions for challenging issues, opening up possibilities for sustainable futures. Furthermore, the Erasmus+ Urban GoodCamp project aims to empower higher education institutions and their urban stakeholders to tackle pressing urban challenges by creating and actively engaging urban communities of practice, and by developing and implementing multidisciplinary learning interventions. In addition to describing the conceptual elements of respective learning and collaboration models, this paper presents two real-life implementation cases tackling urban mobility issues in the city of Ljubljana.
