Overall Rating Silver
Overall Score 60.54
Liaison Jane Stewart
Submission Date March 1, 2024

STARS v2.2

Washington and Lee University
AC-5: Immersive Experience

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 2.00 / 2.00 Jane Stewart
Energy Specialist
Treasurer's office
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

Does the institution offer at least one immersive, sustainability-focused educational study program that is one week or more in length?:
Yes

A brief description of the sustainability-focused immersive program(s) offered by the institution:
The University offers several sustainability-focused immersive programs. Examples include:
1. International Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability.
Do corporations have an obligation to manage their social impact in addition to maximizing sales, profits and stock price? What happens when these objectives are in conflict with each other? This Business 191 course explores the relative roles of businesses, not-for-profits, government, and individual citizens in managing social and environmental impact. Students spend significant time exploring case studies and interacting with senior management of various companies. Recent examples include Carlsberg, Dr. Pepper-Snapple Group, Dunkin’ Brands, Norden, Novo Nordisk, Pandora, Proctor & Gamble, Starbucks, and Unilever. This course is offered as part of W&L's distinctive Spring Term, meaning it is the only course students are enrolled in during the term and the full focus of all credit hours. The course culminates with two weeks in Copenhagen visiting numerous Danish companies and developing a group research project on a topic chosen by the students.
2. The Environment and Economic Development in Amazonas
Amazonas is a huge Brazilian state of 1.5 million sq. kilometers which retains 94 percent of its original forest cover. This course examines the importance of the forest for economic development in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, and how policies can be developed to promote both environmental protection and an increase in the quality life in both the urban and rural areas of Amazonas. The learning objectives of this course integrate those of the economics and environmental studies majors. Students are asked to use economic tools in an interdisciplinary context to understand the relationships among economic behavior, ecosystems and policy choices. Writing assignments focus on these relationships and look towards the development of executive summary writing skills. This is a supervised Spring Term Abroad course.
3. Environmental Service Learning
In the Environmental Studies 263 course students will collaborate with local Boxerwood Nature Center & Woodland Gardens to create an immersive, narrative-based walking trail by which visitors can experience individual connections to the woodland gardens more deeply as well as gain some knowledge of the natural and cultural histories of the place. Students will incorporate environmental literature and poetry into the reflective trail geared towards adults, including literature and poetry from BIPOC writers.
The final deliverable that students will provide is content for a booklet of activities/reflections/instructions that would correspond with stops along an already-existing trail at Boxerwood. The literature/poetry/history in these activities/reflections/instructions would be designed to help a visitor to Boxerwood immerse in the place and in reflection on various relationships between nature and self. Boxerwood will decide on the best manner to share this content with its visitors, be it in print or in some other electronic manner, and will be responsible for putting the content students develop into a final package for its visitors.

Website URL where information about the institution’s immersive education programs is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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