Calvin College

Case Study

Calvin Environmental Assessment Program (CEAP)

Pedagogy

CEAP presents several advantages in terms of liberal arts pedagogy.  First, students have the potential of encountering CEAP through many classes, multiple times, and at multiple levels.  This learning builds on itself, and grows with the students’ abilities.  Lower-level courses have tended to take on the task of environmental monitoring of elements like water and air quality. Upper-level students have taken on more complex tasks.  Secondly, CEAP provides students with a greater understanding of the inter-disciplinary nature of problems and the role of group work in their solutions by providing a context within which data must be shared across disciplines, and through formal working groups of courses.  For example, geography students collected data on students’ use of campus space, to be analyzed by an advanced statistics class.  This sharing of data forced the geography students to be thorough and pay closer attention to the reporting format of the data collection because others depended on their clarity and because it was going to be used for campus planning.  Classes sometimes form working teams and share data and specialties, modeling real-world working-group strategies.  The data form 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 and thus form the basis for cooperative action and planning.  Thirdly, CEAP classroom projects are underlain with the goal of social change through individual student transformation as well as institutional change through increased visibility and accurate data collection.

 

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