Amherst College
AC-4: Applied Learning

ENST 495 Environmental Studies Senior Seminar (Environmental Studies Dept)

Student Fellows Program (Office of Sustainability)

Statistics and Data Science Fellows (Math and Statistics Dept)

Community Based Learning at Amherst (Center for Community Engagement)

The Office of Sustainability helps oversee and manage the ENST 495 projects, SDS sustainability projects, and the Student Sustainability Fellows Projects. Each project has a dedicated google folder where all of the project materials, reports, and feedback are contained and organized. The Office of Sustainability has weekly - bi-weekly meetings with each of the student project teams / leads to monitor the progress / track the success of each project. In the case of the ENST 495 Capstone course students received regular graded feedback and assessment on their project proposals, systems models, stakeholder maps, logic models, proposed solutions, and final report. For the fellows programs we maintain a moodle course page that includes a weekly reflection prompt as well as a mid program and final program assessment survey. Fellows are also required to do final public professional presentations on their projects at the end of each semester.

Sustainability Projects Portal

The Office of Sustainability maintains a public portal for the campus that highlights applied project opportunities and tracks their progress. The portal provides a centralized project repository that gets updated once a semester by the Sustainability Office.

ENST 495 Environmental Studies Senior Seminar (Environmental Studies Dept)

Course Description:

Achieving sustainability is perhaps the defining idea of our era. The consequences of not achieving sustainability are certainly catastrophic as humanity faces a series of complex, interconnected sustainability challenges (e.g., climate change, racial and socioeconomic inequities, resource depletion and degradation, biodiversity loss, growing population). The data clearly show that our current path and trajectory are unsustainable. The problems are global in scale, long-term in scope, plagued by uncertainty, and in many cases politically contentious. We are at a pivotal crossroads, and the urgency to act grows with each moment if we are to set ourselves on a sustainable path forward. 

Environmental Studies as a field seeks to equip students with the knowledge and skills to contribute to confronting these challenges. In the major, you have developed a scientifically-grounded appreciation of the underlying physical and biological processes that shape ecosystems on Earth and the threats to these supporting systems. You have studied how past and present social and economic systems, power structures, political movements, and systemic economic and racial inequality contribute to and intersect with these challenges, as well as how each of those factors may be changed or transformed to promote more just and sustainable societies. The purpose of the Senior Seminar is to continue strengthening and building your skills in critical evaluation of environmental challenges and engagement in interdisciplinary problem-solving.   

With this goal in mind, we will focus the capstone course on two projects: a team-based campus sustainability assessment and an individual senior research paper. Both projects seek to contribute to your skills in research, communication, engagement with existing expertise, synthesis of information, and development of recommendations for future knowledge acquisition and action. We recognize that you are arriving at the seminar with different interests and paths through the major and seek to support your continued growth as individuals and as a community. Completion of the Senior Seminar serves as the comprehensive requirement for the Environmental Studies major. 

Campus sustainability group project:

Colleges and universities have a major role to play when it comes to leveraging their research, education, operations, and engagement to help effectively address and seek solutions to major sustainability challenges. Sustainability is the quintessential liberal arts topic as it requires interdisciplinary, systems perspectives that the liberal arts is theoretically and foundationally built upon. Project-based, applied learning experiences as well as collaborative learning are pedagogical keystones to sustainability education.

As such, you will work on a team with 3 – 4 classmates on a campus sustainability group project. Each project will be designed to not only help you develop and apply key sustainability competencies, but also allow you to significantly contribute to help shape and drive Amherst College’s sustainability efforts. The final product will be a 10 – 12 page group report and presentation on your particular sustainability project.

Senior research project: 

Each of you has followed a different trajectory through the major and developed interests and expertise in particular methods or topics in environmental studies. The senior research project is an opportunity to develop your knowledge around a specific environmental challenge that you care about and to propose ways to move forward through research or action. You will work throughout the course to develop and write a polished 15-18 page research paper. The paper should identify the issue of key socio-environmental concern and motivate its importance, carefully review the current state of knowledge on that problem, and propose specific and informed future directions for research or policy. The subject that you research is your choice and can be an issue or problem situated in any disciplinary, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary space. You should include substantial engagement with academic literatures in your work and write to communicate with an audience of fellow environmental studies scholars. 

Student Fellows Program (Office of Sustainability)

The Student Fellows Program is the Office of Sustainability’s flagship student program and engages students in real world, applied campus sustainability projects. Students in the program research, track, analyze, and design solutions to campus based sustainability challenges. Although students work on separate, independent projects, the program is intended to be a cohort program that includes personal and professional development components, sustainability instruction, and regular reporting.

Statistics and Data Science Fellows (Math and Statistics Dept)

The Statistics and Data Science Fellows Program helps support statistics and data science at the college. The Student Fellows work on special projects under the direction of the Statistics faculty. The past two years the program has supported 3 - 4 SDS fellows working with the Office of Sustainability on a variety of sustainability related projects including Scope 3 emissions tracking, STARS reporting metrics, waste data compilation and analysis, energy use in the residence halls, sustainability survey results, and food sourcing and procurement analysis. SDS fellows are required to document and submit a report on their projects which they also present publicly at the end of each semester.

Community-Based Learning at Amherst (Center for Community Engagement)

Community-based Learning (CBL) courses are co-designed with representatives from local organizations and/or public schools and institutions. Students complete project-based work that simultaneously benefits a community-based organization while also fulfilling a specific learning objective determined by the instructor. CBL courses include a theoretical foundation for action taken off campus, and reflection activities enable students to make connections between the intellectual rigors of academic study and the needs and expertise of the community. Reflection also helps students recognize the ways in which disciplinary knowledge can impact the lives of others and inspire them to be accountable both in and outside of the classroom. Although not all CBL courses focus on sustainability issues, many of them do. A list of the CBL courses and their content can be found here - https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/experiential-learning/cce/learn/cbl