Below is the second installment of a four-blog mini-series, reposted from the Sustainability Education blog of Living Routes Director Daniel Greenberg. Stay tuned for the next two installments, which will be published in the AASHE blog over the next two weeks.

How can studying abroad help develop “global citizens” – leaders who have a sense of belonging and responsibility both with the peoples of the Earth and with the Earth itself?

In my last post about program design and management I shared about my work with the Forum on Education Abroad's Subcommittee on Sustainability Standards and how we offered revisions to their Standards of Good Practice and Code of Ethics documents in four areas:

1. Program Design and Management
2. Student Learning
3. Staff Training and Office Management
4. Promotion

In this second of a four-blog mini-series, I will flesh out ways we can support students learning about sustainability while studying abroad, using Living Routes (the organization I direct) as a case study. The question we asked was:

"How [can a study abroad] organization foster faculty, staff and student awareness, of the impact of its program and its students on the natural and social environment and actively encourage its program staff and students to minimize behaviors that will negatively impact this environment?"

Here are five suggestions we came up with:

1) Encourage and support overseas faculty and staff awareness of local environmental issues (e.g. water, energy, food).

Challenge faculty to develop a project, assignment, or discussion that connects a topic in their curriculum with some aspect of sustainability (e.g. indigenous wisdom, life cycles, diversity, limits to growth). Stay alert to opportunities for student engagement with international eco-initiatives such as the 10/10/10 Global Work Party or eARTh Exhibit put on by 350.org or 48GoGreen’s International Online Eco-Film Competition. I will share such opportunities when I find them (a good reason to subscribe to this blog, hint, hint).

Other resources to get you started include Middlebury College’s Going Green Guide for Schools Abroad Directors, Abroad View’s Go Green Resources, and Transitions Abroad’s Responsible Travel Handbook. You might also encourage your staff and directors to listen to this interview with environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben about traveling, studying abroad, and activism.

Living Routes programs are all about sustainable community development so awareness of local and global environmental issues is a prerequisite for all staff and faculty. We set up RSS feeds and Google Alerts and share relevant resources with each other. While occasionally criticized by “old-school” academics, we also tend to hire M.A.s with diverse backgrounds in the sciences, arts and humanities and the social sciences as we believe in an integrated and transdisciplinary pedagogy (and Ph.D.s are often so specialized, it is difficult for them to bridge disciplines).

2) Orient students to the local and global environmental and social impacts of their program participation.

… Not to make them feel guilty, but to help them understand these interconnections and further appreciate this opportunity to travel and study in a foreign land. Suggest they read Astrid Jirka’s article on Sustainable Travel and Study Abroad or adapt Middlebury’s list of Sustainability Resources for Students Studying Abroad.

There are zillions of good resources to help students understand and measure their carbon footprints and this will likely be the topic of a future blog post. Living Routes asks students to upload their itineraries and estimated ground travel onto a GoogleDoc spreadsheet that automatically estimates their individual and collective carbon footprints. We use this information to educate students about their environmental impacts and pursue our Carbon Conscious strategy.

3) Make students aware of contrasting cultural norms and practices and their corresponding environmental impacts.

Given that the U.S. has one of the largest ecological footprints of any country, students can study just about anywhere and lower their impacts simply by adopting local cultural norms and practices such as conserving water, air drying clothes or (God forbid!) doing away with toilet paper.

Some articles Living Routes has used to support students awareness of their “cultural baggage” include Richard Slimbach’s "[Mindful Traveler]"(http://www.livingroutes.org/students/india/program_readings/Mindful_Trav...), Peggy McIntosh’s famous "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" and the Ethical Traveler’s "Thirteen Tips for the Accidental Ambassador."

4) Provide student opportunities to reduce and/or offset their impacts.

Once measured, it is important to explore ways to reduce and/or mitigate student’s environmental impacts. While also worthy of a blog post, a good place to start is the Green Passport, which invites students to commit to specific eco-actions while studying abroad and to connect virtually with other students who have taken a similar pledge. Costa Rican Trails also has a good list of environmental Tips for Travelers.

Several years ago, I developed a Carbon Commitment Calculator, which we have used to encourage Living Routes’ students to make lifestyle changes that reduce their carbon footprint. Then, I found Climate Culture, which takes this concept to a whole new level, including the ability to create “avatars” and virtual worlds that evolve as you become “greener." You can set up groups for students to work together to reduce their programs’ impacts.

While our emphasis should always be on reducing emissions, we’ll never get them to zero. So, what should we do about these remaining emissions? Living Routes has developed a fund, which we continually add to based on each program’s emissions (at $15/mT CO2e). We use this fund to support ecovillage-based carbon mitigation projects. Examples include solar energy (PV systems, solar cookers, solar thermal systems, solar refrigeration, etc.), afforestation/reforestation, biogas, wind power, and Earth-building.

5) Provide opportunities for students to pursue meaningful and socially responsible engagement with the local community.

Encourage students to walk, bike or take public transportation and to shop locally. Arrange opportunities for students to live (and spend time!) with local host families to help them understand and integrate into the local culture.

Service learning provides further opportunities for students to engage with and give back to their local host communities. They get to work on real-life problems, apply what they’ve been learning, and become active local citizens. The National Service-Learning Clearinghouse is an excellent resource on this topic and I intend to write a future blog post on criteria that Living Routes has developed to make sure such opportunities are as sustainable as possible.

These are just a few ways to bring sustainability more into the curriculum and daily lives of students while studying abroad, but it is by no means an exhaustive list. Please add your ideas, suggestions and questions in the comments so we can further develop this topic together. Thanks!

Visit http://www.nwhp.org/whm/index.php to learn more about Women's History Month

2011 Theme - Our History is Our Strength

GRRL PARTS

In 2006, Susan McCully, a dramaturg and lecturer in UMBC’s Department of Theatre, decided to take action against a problem that seemed to crop every with every production: “In faculty meeting after faculty meeting, we would say ‘We have ten women in our scene class, and there just isn’t a decent play with substantial roles for even four women.’ And every theatre department has the same problem–I had this experience when I was in college.” Her solution was to inaugurate the annual “IN 10” festival, which commissioned short plays (most about ten minutes in length) with roles for female actors.

Now known as the GRRL PARTS festival, the tradition continues this year from March 2 through 6 at the UMBC Theatre with a presentation of three plays–two world premieres and one U.S. premiere–all directed by Eve Muson, an assistant professor in UMBC’s Department of Theatre. The commissioned works include Runaways by Ellen McLaughlin, whose plays have been staged throughout the U.S.; Snip, by Karen Hartman, whose multiple awards have included grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; and What Is the Custom of Your Grief? by Timberlake Wertenbaker, a renowned British playwright who is a recipient of the New York Drama Critics Award.

McCully comments, “This is very engaging literature, and it’s the first time the plays as a group have had a global perspective. The three plays share a theme of young women–sisters, wives, mothers and lovers–bound together by desires and destinies beyond their control.”

Over the past seven years, GRRL PARTS has commissioned new plays by Heather McDonald (The Two Marys), Tina Howe (Milk and Water), Naomi Wallace (Duet for Water), Lee Blessing (Into You), Caridad Svich (Stepping on Water), Kia Corthron (Trickle), Phyllis Nagy (The One, The Other) and Naomi Iizuka (This Girl I Used to Know).

McCully plans to eventually publish all the commissioned works as an anthology. “The value of the anthology is that people will be able to pull from it according to their needs–these will be used by colleges and universities throughout the country.”

More information about the GRRL PARTS festival is available at http://www.umbc.edu/arts.

Dept of Theatre
Susan McCully
Eve Muson

(2/25/11)

Practical Idealism

On March 1, 1961, President Kennedy established the Peace Corps by executive order, initiating a program that has sent over 200,000 volunteers to promote global peace through service in 139 countries. The Shriver Peaceworker Program has been a natural extension of the Peace Corps since 1985, when the Shriver family created it to forge a pathway for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RCPVs) to become public service leaders.

The Shrivers later expanded and refined the Peaceworker Program, making it an integral part of the UMBC Shriver Center, where RCPVs now pursue graduate study while continuing their service work locally. More than 125 RCPVs have received advanced degrees through the UMBC program and over the last five years although just 15% of UMBC Peaceworkers have come from Maryland, 90% have chosen to stay and serve the Baltimore-DC region after completing the program.

The Peaceworker Program supports the Shriver Center’s mission to “address the need for remedies to the problems of our central cities,” extending beyond the primarily international mandate of the Peace Corps to tackle the challenges urban America is facing today. After all, reflected professor emeritus and former Peace Corps Member Ed Orser at a recent Peaceworker event, “Baltimore is a hard city to love, but at the same time, it’s a city that’s in so much need of love and so much need of understanding.”

No one understood this challenge better than Sargent Shriver, who served as first director of the Peace Corps and helped craft the Shriver Center’s mission statement. UMBC joined the Shriver family and the nation in mourning Shriver’s passing last month. Today, the campus community is committed to carrying on Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver’s extraordinary legacy of public service.

At UMBC, the Peaceworker Program seeks “to educate and train a new generation of citizen leaders who are able to critically, creatively and responsibly address…complex economic, social and cultural problems.” Program alumnus and Practical Idealist Award recipient Richard Kimball ’10, Ph.D., health policy, used his period of service to redesign the Baltimore Homeless Census. Now affiliated with Johns Hopkins, he focuses on caregiving for people with long-term degenerative diseases.

UMBC Peaceworkers combine graduate study, intensive community service with Greater Baltimore community partners and ethical reflection to “intellectually and personally…integrate the practical, theoretical and moral dimensions of their experience.” Sally Scott (Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers) recognizes, “It’s very hard just on your own to go show up on some city street and say, ‘Hey, I’m here to help.’” The goal is that alumni, like Kimball, develop the knowledge, skills and community connections to identify and implement solutions to deep-rooted social problems.

Even at this time of fiscal challenges, there is broad recognition that service has the potential to profoundly impact society. President Obama signed into law the largest Peace Corps appropriation to-date for FY 2010: $400 million.

UMBC will celebrate the Peace Corps turning 50 – a tremendous milestone in service history – at “Bringing the World Home: Stories from 50 Years of the Peace Corps” on March 1 at Baltimore’s Creative Alliance. For more information on service opportunities and the Peaceworker Program, see the Shriver Center website or contact program Director Joby Taylor or Deputy Director Jennifer Arndt Robinson.

(2/25/11)