Revitalized Honors Service Learning course helps students shape the Virginia Tech Climate Action Living Laboratory
When a group of ambitious Virginia Tech Honors College students are asked to channel their efforts into serving their community by enhancing the sustainability of the campus, what can they achieve? The fall 2023 and spring 2024 Honors Service Learning courses sought to answer that question.
The Honors College has offered service learning opportunities in the past, but like many similar courses at Virginia Tech beyond, the COVID-19 pandemic proved challenging to community-engaged teaching and learning. With support from a VT Engage Faculty Fellow Development Grant, Rachael Budowle, collegiate assistant professor and community engagement lead at the Honors College, aimed to reinvigorate and reimagine the course.
Drawing on a core partnership with the Virginia Tech Office of Sustainability and Office of Energy Management, the course addresses Goal 10 of the 2020 Virginia Tech Climate Action Commitment: the creation of a Climate Action Living Laboratory (CALL). The course partnered students with mentors from the Office of Sustainability, with whom they work directly in the execution of semester-long projects that supported the development of a framework for the Climate Action Living Laboratory.
“The Honors Service Learning course opened my eyes to how I can be a part of real change on campus. Getting involved in the Climate Action Living Laboratory showed me how I, as a student, can work with faculty and staff to make impactful progress toward creating a more sustainable campus. I really valued the opportunity to work with the mentors on a project that the Office of Sustainability can use in the development of the CALL,” said Bella O’Brien, a student in the class and Climate Action Living Laboratory intern.
The fall 2023 course began with students helping to create the Climate Action Living Laboratory vision statement with and for their mentors: “The Virginia Tech Climate Action Living Laboratory will integrate students and faculty with staff to achieve the goals of Virginia Tech Climate Action Commitment through a collaborative framework. Through transformative research, teaching and learning, and service, the CALL will build a sustainable and equitable future for our campus and the surrounding community.”
Across the two semesters, students have supported numerous projects that will build a strong foundation for the Climate Action Living Laboratory. These include, for example, creating a series of spotlights around past teaching, learning, and research projects that aim to meet particular Virginia Tech Climate Action Commitment goals; interviewing operational and administrative staff to create a menu of their priority projects; and planning a showcase event to celebrate the Climate Action Living Laboratory framework and further engage students, faculty, and staff across the university. The projects resulted in tangible deliverables that lay the groundwork for future students, faculty, and staff involved with the Climate Action Living Laboratory to build on.
For the students in the class, this served a dual purpose: in addition to learning about sustainability broadly and at the university specifically, this project-based structure allows students to act as sustainability professionals-in-training, giving them experience with real-world community-engaged action in pursuit of meaningful change. Another aspect of the course is regular targeted field trips to augment project-based learning. Through visits to sites such as the Catawba Sustainability Center, Homefield Farms, and one of the Virginia Tech chilled water plants, students learn about critical sustainability issues impacting the community of which they are a part.
These course features are representative of the Honors College commitment to experiential learning and transdisciplinary collaboration. By focusing on these types of project-based learning experiences, Honors College courses serve as a platform to allow students to collaborate in transdisciplinary environments on real-world problems – and feel the tangible effects that their work has.
“By directly engaging in the immediate campus and community in which we live, students leave the course with a framework for addressing pressing sustainability challenges in their own lives — personally, professionally, academically, and collectively with others. In addition to student learning, the course aims to move beyond direct service toward more deeply community-engaged learning, serving and collaborating with mentors over the long-term and ideally in more equitable and less burdensome ways. Ideally, the course will sustain partnerships semester after semester for greater impact,” said Budowle.
The Honors College is positioned to be able to serve as a testing ground for these sorts of equitable partnerships across the campus and community. Because of its relatively small class sizes, faculty dedicated to the principles of experiential learning and transdisciplinary collaboration, and the quality and ambition of its students, the Honors College can pilot partnerships like those featured in this course and develop effective methodologies that can be scaled up across the university and beyond.
With support from the VT Engage Faculty Fellow development grant, Budowle was able to hire two Climate Action Living Laboratory interns to serve as peer mentors, participate in research, and support further Climate Action Living Laboratory implementation — particularly planning and hosting the Climate Action Living Laboratory Showcase, held as part of Earth Week festivities.
Organized by the Office of Sustainability and the Honors Service Learning students across the fall and spring semesters, the showcase featured an array of presentations from students, faculty, and staff across the university. During a poster session, students - those in the service learning course, student interns from the Office of Sustainability, and others - presented projects related to the Climate Action Living Laboratory and climate action across campus.
Faculty from across the university took part in a panel discussion about integrating climate action into their research and teaching. The faculty and staff involved in creating Virginia Tech Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory also presented their work, recontextualized within the framework of the Climate Action Living Laboratory. At the end of the showcase, a facilitated staff-faculty activity helped participants envision future Climate Action Living Laboratory partnerships and collaboration to support a sustainable, equitable future.
