Explore the vast range of titles available.

Recent research indicates that traditional academic structures may not effectively promote self‐directed learning. We investigated whether an experiential interdisciplinary projects program, called the Global Studies Program, increased readiness for self‐directed learning (SDL) and life‐long learning (LLL) using three methods: a nationally recognized course evaluation system called the Individual Development and Educational Assessment system (IDEA); an internal student project quality assessment protocol; and the Self‐Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS). Student self‐assessments through the IDEA system showed Global Studies Program students reported much greater progress in LLL‐related skills than did national and local comparison groups. Similarly, review of student projects by independent faculty teams found Global Studies Program students consistently outscored on‐campus project students in LLL‐related measures by wide margins. The SDLRS also showed a positive, but less emphatic increase in SDL readiness among a Global Studies Program cohort. The research demonstrates the success of one experiential learning environment in promoting SDL/LLL, while raising interesting issues regarding alternative methods of measuring potential benefits.

With the global need for new approaches to sustainable development in periurban \\“slums” as a backdrop, this paper reports on an innovative approach to community-based, in situ informal settlement upgrading in the Monwabisi Park community of Cape Town, South Africa. The program is an experimental effort to combine the creative resources of parties that often have difficulty working together to nurture local self-help efforts that, with judicious and limited outside resources, can lead to sustained provision of improved community services and infrastructure. Starting with a local street committee’s creation of a children’s crèche in 2005 and partnering with a small local NGO, the Indlovu Project has established a set of public amenities and a vision for the future that combines western sustainable development concepts such as permaculture with Xhosa cultural sensibilities regarding equity, ubuntu, collective decision-making and the nature of private and public spaces. The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), a US university, has through an experiential science-technology-society educational program begun engaging students and faculty members with community members and city agencies to develop an integrated plan for transforming the eleven year old Monwabisi Park squatter camp into an \\“ecovillage” based on these local community perspectives and desires. This paper discusses the principles and strategies underlying the redevelopment effort; explores how students can be uniquely positioned as agents of redevelopment; and presents some of the unique strategies and services that are emerging through this collective effort.

As concern about the sustainability of industrialised economies has increased, analysts have developed various indicator-based methodologies to explore environmental policy implications of human consumption and production activities. Critical and social constructivist theorists have challenged the presumption of objectivity underlying such research, however, by highlighting the role that social process and tacit assumptions play in accounts of human-environment interactions. While the ' science wars' hostility between realists and constructivists has abated and many in both camps agree that environmental analysts should be more open and reflexive about the empirical limitations of their work and its potential to encode social, political and cultural bias, practical guidance and clear examples for doing so remain rare. This paper is situated within this gap: it is at once an attempt by an environmental analyst to show what a ' self-reflexive' approach to environmental assessment might look like and a rumination on the opportunities and challenges that such an undertaking entails. At the same time, the paper makes traditional scientific claims to creating new knowledge and advancing methodological sophistication by identifying a general problem of spatial indeterminacy that limits the empirical basis of all manner of place-based environmental assessment. The paper uses a climate change-related case study regarding the attribution of carbon emissions from electricity use to various US states to show the strong, though generally unrecognised, representational and political implications that can be introduced through the common methodological responses to spatial indeterminacy. I argue that in such cases both positivist and constructivist approaches to understanding human-environmental relations are needed to thoughtfully navigate options for constructing indicators and analysing policy options.

This paper examines sustainability transition dynamics in the US electricity system, drawing on the socio-technical systems approach. We view system change as unfolding along several critical dimensions and geographical scales, including dynamics in the environment, science, civil society, discourse, and state regulatory institutions, as well as in capital and technology formations. A particular emphasis is given to the interaction of discourses, policy networks, and institutions. We trace four distinct regimes which have characterized the evolution of this discourse-network-institutional nexus over the last century. The research examines dynamics that present a challenge to the incumbent energy regime based on fossil fuels, nuclear and hydropower, and demonstrates how the actor-network supporting renewables and energy efficiency has grown stronger and more capable of moving toward a sustainability transition than at any time since the sustainable energy movement began a generation ago.

\"Energy Structures and Environmental Futures in Europe\" by Torleif Haugland, Helge Ole Bergesen and Kjell Roland is reviewed.

From 2007 to 2019, over 650 public schools closed in Puerto Rico. School closures not only affect students and teachers; these spaces serve as anchor institutions providing social infrastructure for the sustained health of communities. While closed schools remove a critical community asset, these vacant buildings provide adaptive reuse opportunities for alternative social infrastructure and community resources. This article explores how abandoned schools are repurposed in Puerto Rico, focusing on “rescued schools”—that is, grassroots, voluntary initiatives that repurpose schools to support community development. Through a multi-method approach, we categorized and mapped 161 repurposed schools throughout Puerto Rico—38 were rescued schools—and conducted twelve interviews and two focus groups on rescued school initiatives. Our results describe how abandoned schools offer a galvanizing opportunity for motivated community members to meet emerging, localized needs, and the challenges in gaining school ownership and attracting sustained financial and volunteer support, the lack of which impedes their potential impact. We demonstrate how rescued schools embody alternative regional political visions within Puerto Rico and argue that government authorities can minimize the harm from school closures by forging new partnerships between community-based organizations, municipal governments, and other supportive actors to repurpose schools and reproduce their role as community anchor institutions.

It is widely acknowledged that the sustainability challenges facing the world require new approaches to teaching and learning. At the community level, however, sustainability priorities are context specific, so prescriptions of what and how to teach for sustainability are limiting. In higher education, one innovative approach to sustainability education that acknowledges the limits of conventional coursework involves courses based on “shared action learning” – a process in which students, faculty, and community sponsors share learning experiences while working on sustainability projects for a specific community. Shared Action Learning can be applied in any community context near or far from campus ranging from the very local campus community to distant settlements across the globe. This paper describes the processes, opportunities and challenges of shared action learning through five stages: (1) project impetus, (2) contextual research and project planning, (3) community engagement and project refinement, (4) action, and (5) reflection and reporting. The roles of students, faculty, sponsors, and communities throughout the semester-long shared action learning project are explored through two examples – a course at Clark University in Worcester, MA that focuses on SAL within the college campus community and a Worcester Polytechnic Institute program through which students work on projects with partners in informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa.

ACADEMICS OFTEN 'teach their research,' but few 'research their teaching,' at least formally, for a host of good reasons, not least being the investment required to become conversant in theories and methodologies outside one's primary academic community. However, with rapid change in the practice of engineering spurring new educational requirements and approaches to teaching, there is ample opportunity and need for those interested in educational research to provide insight into effective pedagogy.

At Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), much of our teaching is connected with the Global Perspective Program, an experiential learning program that has third-year students conducting intensive, interdisciplinary research projects for sponsoring organizations in Puerto Rico, Thailand, Australia, Namibia, England and other places worldwide. The goals of the program are ambitious, among them developing student capacity to research real, open-ended challenges at the interface of technology and society and in the process to develop capacities for teamwork, written and oral communication, critical thinking and cross-cultural appreciation and collaboration.