By Alexis Fineman

By Dru Marion

This fall, after a year of remote learning, SEI's Climate Corps Education Outside Fellows worked to rehabilitate the campus gardens at their schools and bring students back outside for garden class. Thanks to our cohort of twenty-nine incredible Fellows, thousands of students are once again getting the opportunity to engage with inquiry-based, hands-on science and ecoliteracy lessons during the regular school day and directly on their own school campuses. We hope you enjoy these snapshots joy, growth and (re)discovery in the school garden classroom:

​What does a resilient world look like to you?
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To quote Aldo Leopold, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” While written decades ago during a very different time on Earth, Leopold’s words guide my thinking about what a resilient world looks like - A world that has human-designed systems that support the needs of both people and the planet. ​A world with systems that are centered on equity. A world with systems that are powered by renewable energy, have zero waste, and build strength and resilience from diversity. As the people lucky enough to be alive during this pivotal time in history, we have the opportunity to reimagine those systems to ensure that we are resilient in the face of a changing planet. ​

Energize Colleges, a program of SEI, an environmental education and workforce organization, is supporting the February 2022 launch of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) across the 23 campus California State University (CSU) system. The FLC will facilitate integrating climate change and resilience content across the breadth of disciplines offered at the CSU campuses. This initiative is designed to offer faculty practical tools, resources, and ideas to integrate key concepts related to climate change and climate change resilience into student learning outcomes. 

The FLC arose from Chico State’s Office of Faculty Development and the Campus Sustainability Curriculum Subcommittee’s actions to meet their President’s Strategic Priority for Resilient and Sustainable Systems. Dr. Mark Stemen, Chico State professor of Geography and Planning, will be the FLC Facilitator. Professor Stemen has hosted over a dozen faculty development workshops on integrating sustainability in the college curriculum as part of the annual California Higher Education Sustainability Conference.

Since 2016, SEI’s Energize Colleges program has supported California higher education institutions to advance sustainability education, applied learning and career exploration with students. A dedicated Climate Corps Energize Colleges Fellow will support the CSU Chancellor’s Office in coordinating the statewide FLC initiatives through close collaboration with key faculty, department chairs, and deans across participating campuses. ​

“This is a time of change…I think everywhere... uncertainty and change.”  - Beth Weinman

Dr. Beth Weinman, faculty member in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at Fresno State, knows how much the world is changing and how much need there is to build a sustainable workforce in order to address the shift towards greener infrastructure. She believes that in higher education this change can be navigated by strategically bringing together people across the university - administration, faculty, facilities and students - to see what can be done better. 

Through SEI’s Energize Colleges program, Beth fosters collaborative relationships to institute the campus as a living lab model and provide sustainability-focused internships to university students at Fresno State. These internships are a part of a high impact practice for since students who participate in internships and other hands-on extracurricular engagement tend to perform better post-graduation. Beth believes that the Energize Colleges internships empower students to help the university, and provide something that the classroom cannot.
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