A new article in Inside Higher Ed profiles a growing trend: hosting a themed "year of sustainability" on campus. The story notes, "with multiple campuses, including Davidson College, New Mexico State, Villanova University and University of Denver having just finished up their years, the results have been varied, and some question whether the concept is more than a gimmick."

The schools featured took different approaches, including everything from reducing food waste and increasing recycling to creating new graduate programs or minors that focus on sustainability.

The story goes on to quote NWF's director of campus and community leadership, Julian Keniry, who says, "Sustainability is something that needs to be the purpose of education across operations and disciplines and sustained over time. The idea of focusing on a one year theme doesn't lend itself to a [sustainable approach]. But it might be a way to catalyze thinking that could lead to long term work."

The point almost seems too obvious to make. A "year of sustainability" shouldn't be a discrete event, but rather a kick-off to bolder steps. By definition, sustainability is about the long-term, about making communities and campuses more flexible, more resilient and more useful over time. If treated as a fad, it will fail.

So it's encouraging to see that none of the faculty or staff interviewed for the story thought of their efforts as a one-off. Says Kealy Devoy, Davidson's sustainability fellow, "We haven't achieved 100 percent on most of the goals, but I don't consider that an issue because we're not going to just stop." 

The Charleston Regional Business Journal reports that Virginia Tech has teamed up with Trident Technical College to develop curriculum in the green sector. According to the article, "the two schools will develop curricula on green building, green engineering technology and other energy efficiency-related areas. Virginia Tech will also help Trident develop a comprehensive energy efficiency retrofit program."

While many schools have set up such collaborations in order to get access to solar panels or other renewable energy equipment for their students, Trident's focus will be on weatherization and energy audits, as one of six energy efficiency training centers in the state of south Carolina. Money for the training program is coming from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

A short-and-sweet story at the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that even English majors can get their hands dirty at Furman University:

"The course was about Henry David Thoreau's Walden,
but instead of simply reading the memoir and discussing it in a traditional classroom setting, David Bernardy took his class to a wooded area near a 30-acre lake on the college's campus to build a cabin similar to the one Thoreau had written about in his book," says the report.

Thoreau might have approved. Considered a pioneer of nature writing, he is often referenced by modern environmentalists and social justice advocates who admire his commitment to deliberately living well with less, his thoughts on equality, and his willingness to spend most of his time out in the natural world, providing for himself and learning about his environment. Walden is as much an examination of the ways people should live as a memoir, and the questions Thoreau poses are as valid today as when they were written, particularly in the face of large-scale environmental collapse. So, as this group of students read Thoreau and then put themselves in a similar place, doing similar work, one imagines they were able to gain more from the text than they would have by simply reading it in an American Lit course.

Drew Woten, a sophomore in the course, believes it was a success. He said, "It helped us come to appreciate what he did, and to learn what it's like to really use your hands and use engineering and construction, as well as problem solving." He adds that Thoreau would have found it "silly for someone to sit in a classroom and just listen to lecturing."

More and more, faculty are deciding that students need these chances to learn differently. Bernardy says, "I think anytime you can help the students understand the text through something tangible and experiential, you create pathways of understanding that go beyond typical classroom learning."

Image credit: bjearwicke/stock.xchng

Curious about the finer points of the clean energy grid? Looking for new ideas on campus low-impact farming or biomass plants? Just need to relax by watching students throw paint on each other in the name of art?

YouTube's new higher education site might have you covered. Already, more than 20,000 videos have been uploaded from universities like Wesleyan, Harvard, Dartmouth, UNC-Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Minnesota and Virginia Tech. Topics cover everything from quantum physics to curing kleptomania, in a variety of formats, such as full-length lectures, short interviews, or webcam anecdotes.

The site offers to extend the reach of the university beyond traditional students, which sounds like a good idea to us, especially when it comes to keeping up with the latest research on renewable energy and sustainability. In fact, even though the site was only launched a few weeks ago, 85 results come up for the term 'clean energy,' and 'sustainability' pulls almost 300.

One of the first sessions at this year’s Smart and Sustainable Campuses Conference gave community colleges a starring role in preparing students for jobs in a greener economy.

Keith Ratcliff of the Central Piedmont Community College Center for Sustainability began by asking, “Don’t we want our students to learn a skill, to be able to get a job? My son is in college now, and when I ask the school what kind of job he’s going to be able to get, how much money he might make, they don’t have any idea. Think about it, they don’t know what my son’s job prospects will be.”

In the next ten years, Ratcliff said, 75% of American jobs will require a two-year degree. This fits with other studies that claim much of the projected demand in green-collar jobs will be in middle-skilled occupations: those that require some education beyond high school, but not a Bachelor’s degree. The fact that community colleges fit right in this spot, said Ratcliff, is an untapped opportunity. “People are so interested in this issue. After a talk I gave to a bunch of sales and marketing people, many of whom were losing their jobs, they were so excited that they came down to campus and signed up for our training program,” he said. “I’m not making that up.”

Central Piedmont Community College has indeed seen a hike in applicants for the new Associate’s degree program in sustainable technology, which offers students the choice of an emphasis in alternative energy, environmental engineering, sustainable manufacturing, or green building.

Most importantly, said Ratcliff, schools shouldn’t train people for jobs that don’t exist. “When we were launching this program, what I had to do was call over 130 companies, find the right person, tell them about the program, and ask if they would have a need for these students in two years. And these companies told us that they could see that need coming up.” (A recent WorldChanging article shows how some schools have partnered with local workforce boards to do similar research on green employment opportunities.)

The greatest demands in North Carolina, where CPCC is located, are expected to be in research and development, biotech, manufacturing of clean energy components and equipment, clean energy distribution, and construction and maintenance, many of which can be embedded into existing programs at community colleges. “A green engineer or green architect can be trained within the program that already exists, with a few changes,” finished Ratcliff. “You don’t start from ground zero—a person is already an engineer, or a plumber, or an electrician.”

We’re blogging the Smart and Sustainable Campuses Conference at University of Maryland today and tomorrow. If you were in any of the sessions, share your notes in the comments.

Our own Xarissa Holdaway has a story at WorldChanging that describes how some California community colleges are experimenting with green-collar training programs.

In many regions, early reports suggest there are not enough workers to meet demand for wind, solar and geothermal projects, while some states find the opposite: that there are more trained professionals than there are jobs. A report from the National Council on Workforce Education states,

"[M]any jobs that are currently, or predicted to be, in demand are ‘middle-skilled’ jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree. It is important to note that although there will be a growing number of new green occupations requiring new knowledge, skills, and abilities, it is expected that the majority will be transformed from existing jobs, requiring a redefinition of skill sets, methods, and occupational profiles."

To more accurately predict when and where workers will be required, not to mention training these workers, she reports that community colleges are turning to local organizations and pioneering a new collaborative model that can "respond to trends in clean and green technology." One such project, the New Energy Workforce (NEW) Initiative, a partnership between Bay Area community colleges and regional workforce investment boards, is able to conduct courses, research employment opportunities, and share successful curricula between schools. 

Kitty O'Doherty, convener of the NEW project, says, "This is a call for new levels of collaboration. We convened the Workforce Investment Boards and the colleges in our region in February, and both groups are extremely committed. They [WIBs] are going to have the funding to place people in these jobs, and we're going to have the training. The common mission of preparing individuals for meaningful careers and creating a well-qualified workforce for our region is a very compelling motivator."

Does a teacher have to dance to teach good science? Richard Alley of Penn State does (you can see the original post at DotEarth here), twisting around and waving his arms to show how the earth's orbit influences global temperature and climate, and how these interacts with the atmosphere to create the daily weather conditions that we eventually discuss at cocktail parties. The hope is that such clowning will help students and the odd YouTube viewer understand the science and significance of climate change. Does it work? Hard to say for sure.

Finding new ways to discuss science, particularly such complicated and poorly-understood topics as the climate, is an ongoing challenge for teachers. Between the different learning needs of their pupils and the often-difficult task of distilling ideas that take years to master into a few hour-long classes, very little exists in the way of "best practice."

But to say it doesn't happen might be misleading. We've done a couple of stories on sustainability-focused education, both in and outside environmental science departments. Some focus on faculty training, like the Curriculum for the Biosphere at Washington State, and others immerse students in the outdoors, like Janice Crede at UW-Superior. St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota, uses a themed academic year to involve the whole campus in environmental and sustainability issues. Thomas Pfaff at Ithaca gets his math students to do calculus assignments using real-world data, such as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or world grain production.

Often, these techniques are shared among faculty through disciplinary networks rather than publicized, so it's likely that there is a lot more going on under the surface than us humble bloggers know. What's your experience? Seen any especially interesting or innovative teaching strategies, particularly when it comes to science and sustainability?

Our latest issue is live. Here are today's headlines:

Is There Room for Sustainability in Every Classroom?
Faculty are finding new ways to incorporate issues of ecology, natural resources, social justice and human behavior into their classes, even those not in the environmental sciences.

Overcoming Solar's Challenges with a New Technology
A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented a cheaper method for harnessing solar energy, using a tinted dye that could efficiently absorb and spread energy across the surface of glass panes.

Students Follow the Yellow Bike Road
After a few false starts, bike-sharing programs are springing up in cities and on college campuses around the world, with each finding its own way to get people out of cars for the forty percent of trips in the United States that are less than two miles long.

ClimateEdu, published by National Wildlife Federation's Campus Ecology program, offers news, resources, events, and opportunities for climate leadership on campus. To subscribe to our twice-monthly e-newsletter or browse our archives, visit the homepage: ClimateEdu: News for the Green Campus.

In his inaugural speech, Barack Obama made no less than three separate mentions of the climate crisis, noting that as president he will lead the nation to "roll back the specter of a warming planet."

Now that we're in the first few days of a new administration, there are several events coming up in the next few months intended to bring students together against global warming, the soonest of which is the National Teach-In, which includes a webcast kick-off, a teach-in on February 5th, and a live web interface with members of Congress. It'sGettingHotInHere reports that so far 140 schools have signed up to plan events on campus, engage with their legislators, and unite around concrete policy recommendations in the First 100 Days.

Certainly, as Eban Goodstein points out in a recent Inside Higher Ed piece, we can't assume that university and college students and faculty bear the full weight here, particularly when it comes to advocacy. The National Teach-In was never intended to create or support the "perfect climate bill," or strong-arm politicians into voting for a particular piece of legislation. Rather, it is intended to get the youth who will likely face the greatest consequences of climate change working on solutions.

Scientists tell us that we have waited too long, that for thirty years they have searched for a plausible explanation of climate change that isn't based largely on CO₂ emissions. They haven't found one. And in order to stabilize the climate at a level to which we can adapt, without serious damage to the planet, we must act within the next 2 or 3 years.

Goodstein says, "The science is clear; the solutions are not. Political action is needed to lower the risks of catastrophic consequences, but what kind of action? How much mitigation and how soon? How much adaptation and what kind? Can we insure a “just transition”, protecting low income people from higher energy prices, and compensating workers who might lose their jobs?"

Doing such calculations is really the work of universities. If not there, where? After yesterday's inauguration, how is your campus going to address Obama's appeals to "restore science to its rightful place"?

Sustainability is rarely defined as a single-entity problem, especially when considering recent economic and political traumas. Gordon Rands of Western Illinois University and Mark Starik of George Washington University argued in one of this morning's sessions that a university's plan for sustainability should be taken far beyond the campus border.

Rands says, "An entity can become sustainable on its own, but it can’t remain that way." He went on to stress that without a larger context and a fully sustainable climate (environmental or cultural), even the most exciting higher education projects will be unsuccessful.

For example, a green business is unlikely to survive without competitors' willingness to make similar efforts, as their lower costs will cause the eco-minded company to fail. A college, even one running on renewable energy and stable supply systems, could find itself an island without the involvement of the surrounding town. Unless the local channels for food, telecommunications, energy, transportation, medical care, housing, and other provisions are as able to weather a crisis as the university itself, a few wind turbines and even carbon-neutrality will be ultimately meaningless.

Rands and Starik propose, instead, that a holistic view of higher education would work on five levels:

--Ecological: Ensure the viability and environmental-friendliness of the waste systems, products, and energy that support the university.

--Individual: Members of the institution must be invested and participating, whether that's through following a recycling policy, making sustainability knowledge an integral part of the curriculum. or inventing new storage technology for a solar array.

--Organizational: Make sure that your partners support your work, eg. forming strong industrial ecology arrangements or working with your local town for commuting programs.

--Political: Engage in political mechanisms, such as lobbying, trade associations, and media organizations to affect policy and public information.

--Socio-cultural: Use the university's stature in its community to increase the involvement of off-campus citizens and create a broad culture of sustainability.

The idea that a university has an obligation to the wider community is not new, but is usually considered in terms of thought leadership -- research and innovation will eventually trickle down to the populace, even if no direct conversation takes place. However, Rands and Starik suggest that the university itself do more to collaborate with its neighbors, making everyone greener in the process.

Rands says, "This is still on a conceptual basis. At WIU, we've made some operations changes, but that's pretty much it so far. The model, however, started with business and could easily be aimed at government as well. It's just a way to think about all of this."

We are recapping AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others' blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.