Students to present service-learning projects
The University of Maine’s Campuses for Environmental Stewardship groups will present student service-learning projects from 3–5:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 10 in the Hill Auditorium, Barrows Hall.
Students, faculty and community members will be in attendance. Projects to be discussed include: The Penobscot River dam removal and restoration, and building sustainable energy communities by providing low-cost window inserts.
The Rivers, Dams and Environmental Communication service-learning project took place in two levels of environmental communication in the Department of Communication and Journalism. Working in groups, students drew from a semester-long case study, the Penobscot River Restoration Project, to connect environmental communication perspectives with portfolio materials such as news articles, videos, technical reports, meetings minutes, interview transcripts and more focused on the Penobscot River dam removal and restoration project.
The project responds to a need identified by the New England Sustainability Consortium (NEST) to use environmental communication perspectives to describe and analyze how communication shapes our perceptions about, understandings of, and decisions related to dams, rivers and river restoration.
Students in the economics course Building Sustainable Energy Communities Through Service Learning spent the semester recruiting customers and volunteers, measuring windows in customer homes, and building window inserts, which are pine frames wrapped in two layers of plastic with weatherization stripping around the edges. The students worked with the Unitarian Universalist Society of Bangor (UUSB) and the volunteer-led nonprofit WindowDressers, which specializes in coordinating community-led window insert building events. For a final project, students estimated the energy savings and social benefits associated with the program.
The projects are part of a larger multistate collaborative to support curricular innovation and environmental stewardship.
UMaine belongs to Maine Campus Compact, a coalition of 18 member campuses, whose purpose is to catalyze and lead a movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education.
Maine Campus Compact, in partnership with Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont Campus Compacts, was awarded a Davis Educational Foundation grant to form the Campuses for Environmental Stewardship (CES) program. The program aims to train college faculty in the participating states to develop and deliver courses which partner with community organizations to address pressing environmental issues.
The collaborative continues through fall 2016.
Following the presentations, a screening of the climate change film “This Changes Everything” will be shown through a partnership with the Camden International Film Festival.