Education, Sustainability, New Skills, Capstone

On 9/30/2010 our curriculum class had a joint class with the campus environments class with guest speakers (Shanwa Travena & Krista Hiser) that discussed sustainability from the perspectives of both the physical environment and the curriculum. It was really a great class with two guest speakers talking about projects going on at UH Manoa, within the UH System, and out in the community.

Some topics discussed included sustainability across the curriculum, the triple bottom line (environmental, economic, and social change, a.k.a. people, planet and profits), sustainability in higher education, as well as an in class group activity. Something that Shawna brought up that really got me thinking (well, one of many things, at least) was the idea of new skills that will be necessary for a green workforce in green sustainability jobs. On thing Shawna mentioned was that we have been conditioned in our education to analyze - to take a problem or issue and break it down into pieces and think critically about it. A skill that is equally relevant but perhaps is not used quite as often is synthesis - putting information together and making sense of separate pieces. -If I'm not mistaken, this topic came up partially out of the discussion that environmental/sustainability studies needs to not only be it's own department, but needs to be integrated across the curriculum, in every subject.

This got me thinking about capstone projects, which I believe was one of the discussions we had in class about capstone projects in education - helping students to make sense of their education as not just a string of unrelated courses, but as cohesive and complementary. This then got me thinking about my own education here at UHM, and how I think every single course I've taken has complemented the others (both within and outside of my department), and this is something I absolutely love. There is not anything I have learned in one class that does not somehow help me in another, whether it's about research, student development, law, educational technology, multicultural issues, or disability studies. I recall reading in one of my undergraduate classes (cognitive psych?) that this is ideal, but it may be more difficult to learn in this manner because the information is so similar that your brain has a difficult time differentiating what was learned in one course from the others.

I'm thinking of the possibility of doing a one credit independent study next semester as a capstone experience to my education. Perhaps getting all my syllabi, my papers and projects, my texts together, and spending some time pondering my learning, write about it, blog about it, and maybe even present it to other students in the program (perhaps it may be particularly helpful for the new students in the program)............