DePauw University
AC-5: Immersive Experience

DePauw offers numerous winter and may-term immersive courses which address social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Some examples in the past three years include:

Sustainable Building Practicum: DePauw's Farmhouse
Course leaders Jennifer J. Everett, an associate professor of philosophy and co-director of the Environmental Fellows Program, and energy engineer Chris D. Hoffa originally planned to use this Winter Term to renovate the house, which had been used as a base camp for the Campus Farm. That all fell through when inspections uncovered the mold and structural issues with the foundation. Instead, the course pivoted from construction to deconstruction. The goal for students now: figure out how to tear down the home with the smallest environmental impact.
https://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/32799/
https://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/33106/

Outside: A Course in Environmental Awareness
This outdoor winter term included a component of walking every day. Students walked to the quarry on a snowy day and checked out ancient fossils, learning from Professor Scott Wilkerson how the glaciers came this way via Lake Erie and how the preponderance of Indiana limestone quarries essentially starts here and heads south because of those glaciers. They hoofed it over to Buzzi Unicem (Lone Star) where Bob West showed them the remains of an old kiln that reportedly dates back to the 1850s and walked to the Putnam County Museum and met with local historian Larry Tippin. The course, Heithaus said, is an opportunity for participants to better understand themselves -- not just as DePauw students, but also as citizens of Greencastle and the natural world."
https://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/32826/

Wilderness Writing: Paddling Florida's Everglades
Florida’s Everglades is home to hundreds of common, rare and protected species, and is designated a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Reserve, a Wetland of International Importance. Timm designed the course to link the aesthetic experience and interpretation of place – Florida’s Everglades – with its natural and human history, its significance as an ecosystem, and as a site of scientific, political and economic contention. In preparation, students read and discussed Michael Grunwald’s The Swamp and Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ The Everglades: River of Grass.
https://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/33528/

Writing the Wilderness
Isle Royale is a remote island cluster in Lake Superior and the destination of a recent May Term trip for nine students led by Steven “Steve” R. Timm, professor of communication and theatre. The trip was based on Timm’s focus of his own creative work and scholarship for the last 15 years, which is going to wilderness areas and writing about those experiences. Isle Royale has played a significant role in his work over the years, including being the basis for two plays he wrote and staged for DePauw Theatre in 2007 and 2014.
https://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/31748/

Tropical Ecology in Costa Rica: Nature Writing
Students who signed up for English professor Joe Heithaus and biology professor Janet Vaglia’s course were asked to be ready to work, hike, listen and write about their experiences during their two-week adventure to one of the most biodiverse and ecologically minded countries in the world. By exploring Santa Elena Gulf, the Guanacaste Conservation Area and Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, students are being introduced to the complex issues of tropical ecology of Costa Rica. The group is meeting biologists and parataxonomists in Guanacaste Conservation Area, where they work to inventory the area’s immense diversity of flora and fauna using DNA barcoding. In Monteverde, students are participating in sustainable agriculture on a coffee farm and taking guided hikes in the cloud forest. Heithaus says that students are keeping journals, writing essays and preparing a final project “to better understand and communicate what is at stake in preserving and protecting these critical ecosystems in the face of human threats.”
https://www.depauw.edu/theboulder/details/22-days-of-winter-term/