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By Joe Boomgaard | TBL
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ALLENDALE – Students in Grand Valley State University’s liberal studies program are engaging the community through directed practicum that’s allowing them to wrestle with the meaning of sustainability.
Over the last three years, the liberal studies department has revised its program to afford students more opportunity to go out and experience what they’re studying. Directed studies have focused on poverty or education, but this year the department has added the broad topic of sustainability to the mix.
“The premise of what we do is that good citizens are students who have the ability to reflect and engage,” said Melissa Baker-Boosamra, affiliate professor of liberal studies, who’s supervising the sustainability practicum. “They do the academic piece – the writing and reading, but they’re also self-reflective. The set of skills they develop, we like to think, prepares them to become good citizens.
“Given the interest in the big idea of sustainability, we wanted to investigate what that means and what it has to do with our students.”
In class, the students read and discuss pertinent texts relating to sustainability. From there, they go in teams of a couple of students to the partner organizations to experience how sustainability is being practiced in the community.
At Haworth, students are participating in an audit by helping to gather information about practices at various showrooms to help them become more efficient. Students at Local First are developing a curriculum aimed at local elementary schools to help the young students investigate the importance of local economies in creating sustainable communities.
After the experience at the partner group, the students come back to the classroom to share with fellow classmates.
“It’s really an exploration, a joint exploration…to attempt to better understand what sustainability means, how it’s done and what forces you’re up against when you try to live a sustainable lifestyle,” Baker-Boosamra told TBL.
Baker-Boosamra hopes to develop relationships with existing and new community partners.
“We want to develop relationships with the community that are mutually beneficial. We want to know how can we partner (with other groups), what experience can we bring, what are your needs and how we can fill them. We want to build the spirit of sustainability into the program,” she said.
The program, still a work in progress, crosses many academic disciplines, Baker-Boosamra said.
“It’s a lot of work and mental exercise for all of us to see how sustainable practices fit together.”
Baker-Boosamra believes a successful program would mean the students come away with pertinent experience, “can say that they were able to see the idea of sustainability in a new way. We want to really examine our own lives, our culture and what is it that’s not sustainable and what can we do in the face of that.”
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