Bennington College
AC-2: Learning Outcomes

Each incoming first year student at Bennington is required to take a year long class called First Year Forum. The purpose of this class is to help transition students to Bennington and to offer opportunities to begin to establish relationships with multiple faculty members, you will be registered for the First-Year Forum (FYF). First-Year Forum is a year-long course, led by a Bennington faculty member and a student co-leader. In the FYF, you will work closely with your advisor and the student co-leader to learn about and access campus resources, engage in the community, explore potential new areas of interest, develop reflective writing skills, and learn to approach writing as a process. During the FYF, each year students have been oriented to the campus sustainability efforts. This particular year students were toured through the largest renovation in the College's history and shown how the College took a historic building and built it over and above the State of Vermont Energy code. The students also took courses about fighting climate change from your dorm room where they learn how they can take personal actions to affect change on campus.

The institutions predominant student body, the house chairs, are students in each house that are leaders in the living spaces (very similar to resident advisors at other institutions). These house chairs and trained before the fall term in many different areas, including sustainability. They are trained in living sustainably in the campus housing, and sustainable practices and programs in and around campus.

The figure was determined by searching the Bennington College data base of students who had sustainability specifically written into their plan descriptions for that academic year. This category was determined by searching out database for anyone that had Environmental Studies in their plan title. This is not inclusive of all the students that studied sustainability, just students who had it in their title.

Bennington College does not have majors or minors, students have freedom to study anything they'd like to. And we encourage students to widen their knowledge breadth before they study something deeply.

These are some of the course work student undertook that include sustainability
though do not list it in their plan title: International conflict and leadership, the environment, incarceration reform, a regenerative economy, an educated and emboldened citizenry—imagine an education where the world's most urgent issues are your subject matter and doing something about them is your aim.

Through coursework and fieldwork, students develop capacities essential to taking effective action in the world, whether that means identifying stakeholders and building coalitions and collaborations, honing problem-solving skills, learning the techniques of effective mediation, understanding how to effect policy decisions by lawmakers, or the myriad other components of making meaningful change in the world.

In these efforts, students work with faculty who defy categorization, people who draw on Bennington's deep artistic and analytic resources to collaborate with public and private organizations and leverage the classroom as a new kind of laboratory for creative problem-solving—work that converges in the Center for the Advancement of Public Action.