Environment

Students will be required to present on independent research projects related to sustainability and the environment that they will undertake while in Beijing and Tokyo for the Exploring Asia [AS215] January Term course. With the help of this grant, these presentations will be made public, incorporating not only other St Olaf students and faculty, but also Arcadia Charter School.

Students investigate community-based approaches to environmental sustainability during this January Term course taught at the Asian Rural Institute (ARI) in northern Japan. Students explore how ARI builds on local Japanese resources to support its mission of training rural leaders from developing countries in organic agricultural practices. Activities include field trips, discussions, and symposia with Japanese students, as well as hands-on participation in the daily food life at ARI.

For the past nine years we have hosted eight elementary classrooms a year from Greenvale Community School to St. Olaf’s Natural Lands to learn about wetlands. The program takes advantage of St. Olaf’s 15 wetlands and 150 acres of restored prairie.  Students in Conservation Biology participated in the wetland site visits from elementary students and created an educational product that supported this effort to educate students about our local wetlands.

See more detail about similar past civic engagement assignments in this class – Project Description for Conservation Biology (Word doc.)

As part of this course, St. Olaf students visited Greenvale Community School twice during month-long January Term course to engage several classes of 3rd graders on topics related to food and the environment and healthy eating. This interdisciplinary course uses basic concepts of environmental science to explore global environmental issues. Topics are drawn from recent texts and current periodic literature, and participants will recognize many of the themes from coverage in the media. Because most environmental problems involve issues beyond the sciences, the class examines the economic, political, and ethical dimensions of environmental questions and environmental decision-making.

Solving complex environmental problems and generating creative work requires the integration and application of multiple ways of knowing. Team projects connected to community needs bring the department’s three areas of emphasis into conversation within an experiential learning framework. The course attends to the nature of environmental inquiry and creativity, one’s own perspectives and values, and how to use one’s knowledge and skills to contribute in personal, civic and work related roles.

Groups of students utilize skills and knowledge informed by environmental studies courses to conduct research and complete projects for various local organizations.  The academic civic engagement component of this course varies year-to-year depending on available projects.  There may be some years in which the course does not have an ACE component.

Students will pursue historical research on a topic of their choosing related to the environmental history of Northfield and present their final projects in a public symposium at the end of the semester.  The students’ research papers will be shared with the Northfield History Collaborative and made publicly accessible on its website and any oral histories they conduct will be added to the collections of the Northfield Historical Society.  View collection of Student Research Papers.

Environmental stewardship manifests itself in place and culturally specific ways here and in Asia. Through collaborative experimental design students will conduct and communicate environment and sustainability research during this course at the Asian Rural Institute in northern Japan, and they will discover how landscapes and institutions recover after a major disturbance. Field trips, discussion, and symposia with Japanese students, as well as participation in the daily Foodlife at ARI enrich the context of the work.

Students in this course will plan and teach a series of classes on invertebrates to students at Prairie Creek Community School.

Students will create dialogue guides around climate change topics and facilitate dialogues with constituents at local congregations.