Green Mountain College
ER-12: Sustainability Immersive Experience

For over a decade, Green Mountain College has offered a series of immersion courses focused on regional issues. Taught by four to five faculty members, these nine to fifteen credit block courses engage students in understanding the complex social, economic and ecological dynamics of the region and wrestle with competing visions of the region’s future. For example, in 2009, an economist, a biologist, and two policy professors taught a block course on the Poultney River in which students conducted research on the economic valuation of increased water quality in the Poultney Watershed. They presented their results to several Vermont state agencies and at the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont. Other block courses have focused on the northern forest, the Champlain basin, the Hudson River, local food systems in Vermont, and the Tyrolean region in Northern Italy.