SUS 365 - Local Sustainability

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirement SC and IL.
Meets requirement: IEL
Prerequisite(s): Any single course in the Sustainability Studies Minor.
This course will take an integrated approach to analyzing sustainability at the local level, specifically looking at communities in the Lehigh Valley, and exploring human-environment issues within the context of the relationship among individuals, institutions, and ecology. This course focuses on teaching students science as a way of knowing and illustrating the importance of integrating scientific understanding with other disciplinary and societal perspective to advance sustainability in our local community. This is a field trip based, service-learning course where students will apply understanding of globally important sustainability issues to locally relevant situations through a series of 8-10 interactive field trips, reflective journaling, and community engaged research. The class will culminate with semester-long service-learning projects, collaboratively designed and conducted with our community partners. These projects will have students scientifically assessing current sustainability efforts and developing recommendations to advance our community partners’ missions by effectively integrating scientific understanding with our community partners’ experiences with outreach and communication, natural resource management, and local political and social engagement. Priorities for research will be determined in collaboration with community partners, and results and recommendations will be shared with and used by our community partners to advance their missions.