Panels
Greening of the Campus IX: Building Pedagogy
March 18-21, 2012,
L.A. Pittenger Student Center, Ball State University, Muncie, IN
Panels Announced
We are pleased to announce the panels which will be available during the Greening of the Campus Conference IX. Following are narratives of each. The more detailed scheduling of these is forthcoming, but in the meantime colleagues might want to read through the options to begin to flag those gatherings of most interest.
How Students are Supporting the Clean Energy Shift on Campuses and What They are Learning About Behavior Change in the Process
Julian Keniry, National Wildlife Federation, Reston, VA
Maria Rosales, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Linda Petee, Delta College
Ball State University Students: Samantha Bronowski, Hans Rasmussen, Peter Walker, Shannon Creasy, LEED GA
This panel will highlight student leaders and their diverse experiences fostering the behavior changes that conserve energy and help better position campuses for the shift to clean energy. Projects featured will include student applications of energy and resource feedback in residences, roles in creating financing incentives such as student fees/green revolving loan fund initiatives, and peer education such as lab fume hood education and office conservation.
NWF will help recruit speakers who are either current student leaders or recent graduates who are leading energy behavior education initiatives on campuses. Each speaker will explain the following: basic outline of their project, history, engagement strategies (including and beyond the sustainability choir), environmental and financial benefits, linkages to academic and career goals, tips for other students.
NWF will note its Generation E report and associated student wiki as a resource for further support, along with such resources as Christina Erickson’s guide to Eco-Reps and SEI’s Greening the Bottom Line.
Campus Energy Paradigm Shift: Examining Diverse Campus Strategies Resulting in the Largest Carbon Pollution Reduction, Cost Savings and Student Learning Benefits Julian Keniry, National Wildlife Federation, Reston, VA
Jim Lowe, Ball State University (tentative)
Joshua Pearce, Michigan Technological University
Mary Guzowski, University of Minnesota
This panel presentation will examine three campuses in diverse regions of the US that have achieved the nation’s largest reductions in campus carbon pollution, while enhancing students’ learning and yielding a good financial return on investment. The campuses featured will be either nearly grid neutral (or positive) or will have strongly positioned themselves to take that next step by addressing the heating cooling load and demand-side strategies.
Campuses featured: NWF will help recruit leaders who can cover the following: hybrid approaches (e.g. gasification/wind), exceptionally large solar thermal or photovoltaic arrays, and networked buildings (e.g. heat exchange, heat-pumps). We are currently in the process of approaching: University of Minnesota-Morris, Butte College and Ball State University. Other possibilities include Middlebury, UNH, or Richard Stockton College depending upon speaker availability.
Each panel leader will cover some or all of seven dimensions of the efforts: net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and how those were achieved, cultural values and motivation for the shift, financing and return on investment, student learning roles and benefits (including career pathways and jobs), demand-side strategies to complement the infrastructure enhancements, community partnerships, and research questions underway.
NWF will introduce the audience to its report, Going Underground on Campus, and related resources. We will also bring in a videographer to create a 15-minute segment on the program for upload to one of the free video sharing services, managing necessary releases.
PALS (Partnership for Academic Leadership in Sustainability) Leading Change Through Inter-Institutional Collaboration Debera Johnson, Bill Barrett, Louis St. Pierre, Cameron Tonkinwise
Pratt Institute, NY, NY; AICAD; Emily Carr University, Vancouver, BC; Parsons New School of Design, NY, NY
How can 30 competing schools come together to collaborate for change and collectively improve the academic experience of our students? This was the question posed to 30 presidents of private art and design colleges and universities in April 2009 by Debera Johnson, the Academic Director of Sustainability at Pratt Institute. The issue on the table was the cost of education and tuition driven budgets and Johnson was suggesting that sustainability was a way to leverage resources between the schools. Two and a half years later, at the second of five planned summits, 30 schools returned to Pratt Institute to begin the implementation of the plan established at the first PALS summit in 2010.
The PALS mission is to share our processes and leverage resources across institutions in order to gain support for and integrate sustainable best practices into our academic programs and use our campuses as living laboratories. The PALS cohort consists of 30 fellows, each appointed by and reporting (PALS outcomes) to the presidents and CAO/Provosts of their home institutions.
The goal of year one: To engage leadership to make sustainability a strategic initiative. At the 2010 PALS summit the group worked together to build a presentation for the president and provost that defined sustainability as a strategic focus. The group worked over the year to build its mission and goals and solidify partnerships with AICAD and ACUPCC. The mission of PALS – to hold a five year inter-institutional dialogue on integrating sustainability into our programs, create shared experiences that enhance the academic experience for our faculty and students, to guide leadership in incorporating sustainability into the strategic goals of their institutions and to prototype and practice an infrastructure for future collaborations between the schools.
Now entering the second year the group has divided into five workgroups.
- Achievements – what have we accomplished? A spreadsheet/audit of initiatives by schools
- Aligning sustainability metrics to existing measures used by the institutions
- Measuring for innovation – what can we measure to encourage change?
- Creating shared experiences for students, faculty and others. This includes online platforms, town meetings, archives, and “on demand” conversations between leadership.
- Coordination and oversight
The development and success of this group is a result of carefully constructed experiences. From the engagement of the presidents, to the summit experience this group has been programmed for success. While not without some near failures, this remarkable group has achieved remarkable results, all of which will be shared by the panel.
Building Strong Team Relationships: Same Green Goals, Different Green Perspectives at UW-Whitewater Brian Stankos, Frank Bartlett, Eric Compas
Cannon Design, Chicago, IL; University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, WI
The collaborative design process used during the design, construction, implementation and post-occupancy research of Starin Residence Hall at the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater illustrates how a strong relationship between the design team, building benefactors and campus researchers can promote and enhance sustainable design knowledge. Fostering a relationship between key players in this new model of sustainable design can be difficult, when each player has different inherent goals. But maximizing the common goal of sustainability is key to breaking new ground in sustainable campus design.
Starin Hall, which achieved LEED Gold certification in 2011, will be used as case study to explore successful methods to cultivate these relationships in order to promote the generation of Green knowledge. The design team and building owners will discuss the collaborative design process, and campus researchers will present ways the building has been used to generate sustainable design knowledge. Workshops on environmental design methods established common awareness among staff, students, university representatives, and the design team that increased participation in later design phases. Students toured new residence halls on two other University of Wisconsin campuses to explore how various design options could support and enrich their campus experience. Each team member (design team member, university housing staff and faculty researcher) will review their own experiences during the process, the outcomes of this relationship, and illustrate best practices for promoting successful collaborations on a green building.
The Development, Implementation and Early Assessment of the “Bioregional Dashboard”: Using Real-Time Feedback on Whole-City Electricity and Water Flows as a Mechanism for Building a Culture of Environmental Stewardship John Petersen
Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
Abstract: With support from the Great Lakes Protection Fund, faculty and student researchers at Oberlin College have been collaborating with the City of Oberlin to develop a display of whole-city resource use and quality. A central premise of this work is that real-time display of whole-community water and electricity use in a social and environmental context will foster the development of a culture of environmental stewardship that motivates individuals to conserve resources. Specifically, the goal of the “Bioregional Dashboard” is to help citizens better understand how resource use in individual monitored buildings and households (themselves monitored through “building dashboards”), relate to patterns of use and environmental conditions at the whole-community level. Ultimately, the bioregional dashboard is designed to help viewers develop a stronger sense of connection between their personal resource use and the environmental implications of this resource use such that their personal decisions are then framed as an extension of commitment to the community and to environmental stewardship.
Individual panelists will discuss:
- The bioregional dashboard concept. This presentation will provide an overview of the bioregional dashboard and the psychological and technological underpinnings of the concept as well as a strategy of content development that tells the story of resource flows through a community at multiple scales and levels of detail. (Petersen, Heraty, Sullivan, Canning)
- Integrating environmental messaging into the bioregional dashboard. This presentation will discuss the development and user-testing of environmental messaging for the bioregional dashboard. (Canning, Rosenberg, Sullivan)
- Bioregional dashboard in the public library and downtown businesses. This talk will explore the implementation of the bioregional dashboard in a local coffee house and the Oberlin Public library with an emphasis on site-specific messaging (Rosenberg, Canning)
- Integrating the bioregional dashboard into public education (and public education into the bioregional dashboard). This presentation will explore opportunities for curriculum development and for collaboration between college students, teachers and administrators (Taylor, Tincknell, Myers)
From “Building Dashboards” To Campus Conservation Nationals To Environmental Orbs: Using Real-Time Feedback in the Built Environment to Engage, Educate, Motivate and Empower College Students to Conserve Resources John Petersen
Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
Abstract: The flows of energy and cycles of matter necessary to support human activity in buildings remain largely invisible to occupants. This session will explore the varied ways in which real-time feedback on environmental performance can transform college buildings from places in which learning occurs to fundamental components of a curriculum emphasizing environmental stewardship. Examples discussed will include “building dashboards” that provide detailed information on water and energy use for a non-technical audience. But examples will also include the use of qualitative and multi-sensory devices such as: “environmental orbs” that glow different colors depending on rates of electricity and water use; solar water sculptures that modulate visual and auditory experiences in buildings depending on the intensity of sun falling on exterior solar panels; and geothermal hand holds that change relative temperatures depending on heat extraction or rejection to ground wells.
Individual panelists will discuss: - An overview of the use of real-time feedback in the built environment for green and non-green buildings. This presentation will provide an overview of the range of mechanisms for harnessing real-time feedback on the environmental performance of buildings and building occupants to develop stewardship.
- Development and assessment of “empathetic character gauges”. This presentation will provide an overview of the “Energy Squirrel” and “Wally Walleye” as examples of characters that animate data displays. Research exploring the impact of theses characters on viewers connectedness to nature and behavior will be discussed (Myers, Tincknell)
- Use of local and national competitions as a mechanism for engaging students. This presentation will focus on an analysis of data from the first Campus Conservation Nationals (CCN) and early results from the 2nd annual competition and on an assessment of organizing strategies most useful for motivating students to conserve (deCoriolis, Heraty, Myers, Tincknell)
- Barriers and benefits to conserving water and electricity in the context of campus competitions. This presentation will explore specific barriers to and potential benefits of resource conservation identified in surveys of CCN participants. The results of this analyses suggest that there are a number of ways in which buildings can be improved to make resource saving easier on the individual as well as use of social norms and education to influence residents in different buildings (Myers, Tincknell)
Bridging the Operation and Academic Sustainability Gap—Lessons Learned Through Collaboration at Duke University Tavey Capps, Charlotte Clark
Duke University, Durham, NC
The campus as a “living laboratory” is an often touted goal of university sustainability programs that can be much more challenging in implementation than in theory. There are numerous opportunities to engage students and faculty with campus sustainability initiatives that provide real-world experience to the students and often useful deliverables for the institution. However, coordination across campus silos and managing stakeholder expectations can be complicated. Duke University has been navigating these issues for many years and has found some successful models of collaboration.
This session will explore the successes and lessons learned at Duke from several of these models including:
- Client based course projects - sustainability staff and other operational staff at Duke are “clients” for semester-long, student led consulting projects
- Group Master’s Projects – sustainability staff and other operational staff at Duke help formulate the topic and act as advisors for a collaborative Master’s Thesis for student teams. These year-long projects can contain summer internships prior to the start of the academic year.
- Education Subcommittee of the Campus Sustainability Committee – formal body that recommends activities at Duke to make sustainability a part of the educational and co-curricular experience for all students; promotes opportunities for research around sustainability; and encourages community outreach towards sustainability goals.
Along with these efforts toward collaboration, Duke has recently created a position of “Faculty Director of Sustainability” to more officially connect the University’s operational sustainability efforts with its educational mission.
This session will highlight how staff and faculty can work together to enhance the student experience and provide valuable resources for the university sustainability initiatives. While hard to quantify, the sustainability educational programs within the classroom and beyond may provide the most significant environmental benefit of Duke’s overall program. Creating a campus culture of sustainability and incorporating sustainability education into the curriculum allows Duke to develop an environmentally literate student body that will carry those lessons with them far beyond the campus walls.
BEAT: Energy Hall Challenge and the Future of it Paul Desmond
BEAT, Ball State University, Muncie, IN
The Ball State Energy Action Team is a student-led group aimed at increasing awareness of Energy use, Sustainability Practices, and Living Practices at Ball State University. We aim at creating various interactive programs that will educate students and faculty on lowering their energy use, carbon footprint, and ultimately change behaviors. As a group, we believe that changing one’s behavior, a relatively small change, can amount to something great. We focus on the individual and their practices, tailoring our program that allows the individual to make the changes to their own life, allowing them to see the positive effects that have taken place.
The past two years, the Ball State Energy Action Team has been an interactive group with creating programs that allow individuals to start making behavioral changes that, collectively, have a large impact. BEAT has hosted the Energy Hall Challenge, a bi-annual, one month long competition between Residence Halls that challenge each hall to lower the most amount of energy consumption. As BEAT, we raise awareness, offer tips, advise, guidance to the residents in how they can lower their energy consumption but it is up to them to make changes in their daily actions to see the impact that are having within their own hall and on Ball State’s campus.