What is CEAP?
CEAP is a collaborative effort of faculty across Calvin’s campus, but mainly in the sciences, whose focus is the understanding of the campus and local ecosystem. The goal is to impact the college and local municipalities as well as individual behavior. In this innovative program, faculty dedicate a regular lab session or project to collecting data that contributes to an overall assessment of the environment of the campus and surrounding area. Classes form working teams related to particular environmental issues. The data forms the basis for recommended changes in campus policies, for programs that target individual behavioral changes, and for identifying issues that involve and impact the adjacent neighborhoods. The program is dramatically increasing natural science faculty and students’ involvement in service-learning. CEAP is developing a model that can be used by other colleges and universities to move faculty to greater engagement with the local community.
Who is CEAP?
CEAP involves faculty across the college, but mainly in the sciences, who dedicate regular lab sessions or projects to collecting and analyzing data that contribute to an overall assessment of the environment of the campus and surroundings areas. Much of this research requires cooperative work among classes due to the problems’ interdisciplinary nature. The CEAP program models working-group strategies, with classes sharing data or specialties. For example, writing classes, in conjunction with science classes, will produce newsletters that transmit scientific information in a form for general readership. Engineering and political science students will work together to design wetland structures that filter out nutrients from water entering campus ponds as well as engaging in the work of reducing nutrient inflow from storm sewers draining from the adjacent municipalities’ lawns.
What does CEAP do?
The Calvin Environmental Assessment Program (CEAP) encourages an ethic of service and caretaking by helping students pay attention to that which is closest at hand – the air, wildlife, wetlands, and human communities that surround them. CEAP is a strategy called for in Calvin College’s five year plan to improve the equipping of students to better serve as articulate and resourceful community leaders. CEAP also highlights our interdependence with the local community.
For more information, consult the following links: A Brief History of CEAP | A Philosophy of CEAP