| Overall Rating | Gold - expired |
|---|---|
| Overall Score | 72.61 |
| Liaison | Jack Byrne |
| Submission Date | May 1, 2014 |
| Executive Letter | Download |
Middlebury College
AC-5: Immersive Experience
| Status | Score | Responsible Party |
|---|---|---|
|
2.00 / 2.00 |
Jack
Byrne Director of Sustainability Integration Environmental Affair |
Does the institution offer at least one immersive, sustainability-focused educational study program that meets the criteria for this credit?:
A brief description of the sustainability-focused immersive program(s) offered by the institution:
MAlt is Middlebury’s alternative break program, which provides affordable, service-learning alternatives to traditional February break activities. The goal of the trips is to engage Middlebury students with outside communities in order to share, provide service, and learn about the systems that shape community realities around the world. A recent MAlt trip to Puerto Rico focused on environmental conservation efforts in Puerto Rico’s El Yunque Rainforest. Service included forest maintenance projects and environmental education projects to support the El Yunque National Forest Service’s efforts to educate the thousands of tourists who visit El Yunque every year. Participants on the trip also engaged with researchers in the rainforest to learn the effects of climate change and land use in El Yunque. Another recent trip, 'Exploring Energy: Collecting stories from natural gas production in Bradford Co., PA' explored perspectives surrounding natural gas extraction, and collected stories from landowners and gas field workers to share with the broader community. The trip aimed to develop nuanced and personal understandings of what natural gas development has looked like in Bradford County. They worked with the Pennsylvania Landowner Group for Awareness and Solutions, which intended to collect such stories but had not yet had the capacity to do so.
Environmental Studies offered several immersive experience classes in the 2014 Winter Term. 'Conservation and Land Management in Practice' investigated conservation and resource management issues with a focus on Trinchera Ranch, a 265-square mile ranch in the greater Sangre De Cristo Conservation Area in southern Colorado. Students in 'Education for Sustainability in Action' spent the third week of the semester living together at Shelburne Farms, a global leader in Education for Sustainability (EFS), as they observed and participated in EFS in K-12 classrooms.
The website URL where information about the immersive program(s) is available:
Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
Website for FoodWorks: http://www.middlebury.edu/studentlife/cci/internships/mfw
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