Darlene Seto, graduate student at the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, is featured in this installment of the AASHE Bulletin Sustainability Student Diary series. Her current graduate work revolves around diversity and engagement in alternative food systems. This blog was originally posted on the Getting to GREENR blog, which supports GREENR, an interdisciplinary web portal for environmental and sustainability studies. AASHE welcomes questions and invites feedback on each Sustainability Student Diary entry. Submit diary entries of your own for consideration to bulletin@aashe.org.

Following up on my last post about making sustainable change as a student, I just finished reading a newly released book called "The Nature of College" by James Farrell, a professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. The book questions the way that nature is traditionally perceived on college campuses – how to go beyond the trees, and manicured lawns and gardens. As the opening prelude notes:

“College is a place where students could think twice about American culture and ecosystems, but most students still don’t despite the fact that people are causing climate change—transforming the good earth into a different planet.”

By exploring the life of the average college student, Farrell finds that nature is everywhere; that between the cafeteria food, clothing choices, computer time, parties and more, the life of a student in fact, connects a lot more intimately to nature – and to a sustainable society – than appears at first glance. For example, though time spent on Facebook and other social networking sites may increase social connections, as an anthropocentric (person based) and disconnected form of reality, it may not actually be good in motivating people to take action for sustainability. "The Nature of College," by reconceptualising “campus ecology,” champions another way for students to transform environmentalism into everyday life, and all in all, is a pretty good read as a primer for environment studies.

The idea, I think, follows up on a previous post by Professor Bruce Hull, which talks about acts of sustainability on campus. He says in it, “We can’t just talk and teach sustainability, we must live it and learn how to make it happen.”

Talking to friends, it seems like it’s an idea that is starting to get taken up at colleges and universities across North America.

Mark Werner, a graduate of St. Olaf’s Environment Studies and Philosophy program, and a former participant in Farrell’s own Campus Ecology course (which formed the basis of the book), is a proponent of the value of such forms of learning. One of the things they did in-class, he recalls, is annotate the campus, attaching cards with quotes, statistics, or other information about sustainability on campus, ranging from things like the energy savings from double-paned windows to the pounds of food waste generated by the school cafeteria. Spreading the fruits of their knowledge to the greater campus community, he says, motivated students to start taking action in their own learning around campus, in and outside of the classroom.

At my own campus at the University of British Columbia, one of the newest courses on offer is Applied Sustainability: UBC as a Living Laboratory, which will be open to students across different faculties, and combines theory and knowledge with practical projects that will be geared towards greening the university’s own operations. By having students act, in essence, as consultants for the university, both groups benefit from the project, while driving sustainability action on the ground. What’s also great is that students themselves are helping to design the course, providing a valuable learning experience and providing student perspective to the course syllabus. A fellow environment studies graduate student in my department, Victor Acuna, has been one of individuals. For him, the opportunity has acted as both a rewarding way to contribute to the university initiative, as well as as a personal challenge in terms of communication, as a non-native English language speaker.

It’s remarkable to see these changes happening across North America, and to see my friends and fellow students as champions of them. All I can say is: continue on!

By now, we hope that you've noticed that the AASHE site has undergone a transformation. In January, we relaunched the AASHE website with a major reorganization of content and a new design.

So far, we have received a lot of positive responses to the new website. Although there are many factors at play when determining the success of a web project, we think that the following made the biggest difference in the success of this project: our design partner - ATEN Design Group, the methods we used to involve stakeholders throughout the process, and our continued use of the Drupal content management system.

Design Partner: ATEN Design Group

AASHE started working with ATEN Design Group, a web strategy, design, and development company based in Denver, last summer. We were really impressed with ATEN's experience working with nonprofits and their openness to an inclusive process. One of the great features of the new design is that it is extremely flexible and extensible. Common design patterns are used throughout the site and can be easily reused in the future. For more information about the unique role design played in this project and ATEN's innovative use of javascript, please check out their blog post about our project.

ATEN was a great partner throughout the redesign process. Ken, the primary designer on the project, did a wonderful job incorporating feedback from stakeholders into his designs and showing us ways to improve the design and development process on our end. ATEN also introduced us to Basecamp, which we are now using for other AASHE projects.

The Redesign Process

One of our major concerns before we started even looking for a design company to work with on the redesign was making sure that all AASHE stakeholders had the opportunity to participate in the redesign process. We believe that our continued commitment to an inclusive process made a big difference in the success of this project.

Internally, it had been clear for some time that the AASHE website could be considered cluttered and outdated. The AASHE navigation and homepage content had remained relatively consistent since 2007. However, as an organization, AASHE’s major programs have evolved and its membership has grown considerably. We wanted to make sure that all of our programs were represented on the new site and that content was easier to find. In addition, we wanted to make sure that it was a lot easier for our members to browse the AASHE Resource Center. We also wanted to be sure to feature the more interactive parts of our website, the forums and blog.

Before we started looking for a redesign partner, a group of AASHE staff put together a charter document that outlined the objectives of the redesign project. At AASHE, we use a charter template before beginning most projects that we are publicly sharing for the first time here. The template is based on recommendations from The Principles of Project Management.

Our primary goal was to redesign the functionality and look of the AASHE homepage and provide redesigned templates for other website pages in a way that:

• Clearly communicated to those unfamiliar with AASHE what AASHE does and what its main programs are
• Looked professional, clean, uncluttered, and meets the standards of peer organizations
• Let users navigate to popular parts of the site in one click from the homepage
• Highlighted all of the AASHE programs without overwhelming users with information
• Clearly communicated how to join AASHE
• Provided a clear path to sign up for the AASHE Conference and STARS

As part of our charter document, we also developed a plan for involving staff, board, members and others throughout the design process. In particular we identified key decision points throughout the redesign process and then planned for gathering input from our stakeholders at these points.

These decision points included:

• choosing members, staff, and non-members to interview during the discovery process
• reviewing and approving wireframes
• reviewing and providing feedback on first and second-round designs
• approving the final designs
• evaluating the site before launch

We collected most of our feedback through Google forms where we were able to ask targeted questions that were designed to assess whether the project would meet the objectives outlined above. A smaller team of AASHE staff selected to represent each of the AASHE programs and a board member were responsible for prioritizing feedback and determining whether we were ready to move onto the next decision point.

Whenever possible throughout the process, we tried to make research-based design decisions. For example, our navigation was developed after ATEN carefully analyzed the results of a card-sorting exercise. In addition, we decided to reorganize sections of the site after conducting usability tests with users familiar and unfamiliar with AASHE. ATEN conducted in-person usability tests at their offices in Denver. Later in the process, we used Feedback Army to answer quick usability questions about the new site.

We believe that by integrating user testing and research throughout the process, we were able to avoid some of the natural conflict that arises during a redesign process and also develop a better new site.

Drupal

The AASHE site has been powered by Drupal since 2009. Drupal is an open source content management system that was created and is continuously improved by developers, designers, and others around the world. Switching to Drupal in 2009 has allowed AASHE to tap into an amazing array of resources. There are thousands of Drupal sites out there, including the White House website. As a result of using Drupal, AASHE can quickly roll out interactive features like the Bulletin database, forums, wiki, and blog, without having to spend hours and hours doing custom programming. We also benefit from having thousands of people around the world testing Drupal modules and reporting bug fixes and security issues. Whenever possible, we try to report bugs and submit improvements to Drupal core and contributed code so that we can be part of the effort to make Drupal even better.

As part of the redesign, we realized that there were also times when we were overriding code Drupal functionality for aesthetic but not necessarily user-research backed reasons. During this process, we internally set a principle that we should only override Drupal core and contributed module functionality when doing so is in line with AASHE's mission, vision, and goals and will not present an undue burden to maintain over the next few years. As a result of this decision, we were able to eliminate a lot of confusing, difficult to maintain, code.

During the development process, we also realized that we weren't taking advantage of some of the new, very useful modules like Context, Menu Block, and Less. During the migration process, we extensively used Node Export and Migrate, as well as some custom scripts. As part of the development process, we also were able to eliminate a lot of modules that were no longer in use.

Additionally, as part of our site development, we switch from using Subversion for tracking code changes to Mercurial. Now, all AASHE web projects use Mercurial for version control. For those not familiar with version control, it's a method of allowing developers to work together on a project, share their code, and easily merge, revert, and add to shared code.

Finally, as part of the development process, we switched from using a WYSIWYG editor, CKEditor, to a markdown editor, BUEditor. Transitioning to Markdown has not been easy but we think that the switch will benefit AASHE in the long-run. The major advantages of using Markdown instead of a WYIWYG editor is that it is easier to standardize the display of text on the website and to separate content from presentation. The switch also allows us to avoid creating a lot of "bad HTML," a common problem with WYSIWYG editors. For more information about the benefits of Markdown over WYSIWYG editors, please review this blog post by ATEN.

Summary

We are in the process of doing more user testing to evaluate how well the new design meet the objectives established for this project. As a result, you may see slight changes to the AASHE website over the next few months. In addition, with ATEN's help, we are working of updating the design of our newsletters to reflect the new website design.

We are encouraged by the initial response to the website, and committed to continuing to use an inclusive process and Drupal for future projects. If you have questions about this web project or the site development process, please feel free to contact us at webmaster@aashe.org or post a comment below.

Below is the second installment of a four-blog mini-series, reposted from the Sustainability Education blog of Living Routes Director Daniel Greenberg. Stay tuned for the next two installments, which will be published in the AASHE blog over the next two weeks.

How can studying abroad help develop “global citizens” – leaders who have a sense of belonging and responsibility both with the peoples of the Earth and with the Earth itself?

In my last post about program design and management I shared about my work with the Forum on Education Abroad's Subcommittee on Sustainability Standards and how we offered revisions to their Standards of Good Practice and Code of Ethics documents in four areas:

1. Program Design and Management
2. Student Learning
3. Staff Training and Office Management
4. Promotion

In this second of a four-blog mini-series, I will flesh out ways we can support students learning about sustainability while studying abroad, using Living Routes (the organization I direct) as a case study. The question we asked was:

"How [can a study abroad] organization foster faculty, staff and student awareness, of the impact of its program and its students on the natural and social environment and actively encourage its program staff and students to minimize behaviors that will negatively impact this environment?"

Here are five suggestions we came up with:

1) Encourage and support overseas faculty and staff awareness of local environmental issues (e.g. water, energy, food).

Challenge faculty to develop a project, assignment, or discussion that connects a topic in their curriculum with some aspect of sustainability (e.g. indigenous wisdom, life cycles, diversity, limits to growth). Stay alert to opportunities for student engagement with international eco-initiatives such as the 10/10/10 Global Work Party or eARTh Exhibit put on by 350.org or 48GoGreen’s International Online Eco-Film Competition. I will share such opportunities when I find them (a good reason to subscribe to this blog, hint, hint).

Other resources to get you started include Middlebury College’s Going Green Guide for Schools Abroad Directors, Abroad View’s Go Green Resources, and Transitions Abroad’s Responsible Travel Handbook. You might also encourage your staff and directors to listen to this interview with environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben about traveling, studying abroad, and activism.

Living Routes programs are all about sustainable community development so awareness of local and global environmental issues is a prerequisite for all staff and faculty. We set up RSS feeds and Google Alerts and share relevant resources with each other. While occasionally criticized by “old-school” academics, we also tend to hire M.A.s with diverse backgrounds in the sciences, arts and humanities and the social sciences as we believe in an integrated and transdisciplinary pedagogy (and Ph.D.s are often so specialized, it is difficult for them to bridge disciplines).

2) Orient students to the local and global environmental and social impacts of their program participation.

… Not to make them feel guilty, but to help them understand these interconnections and further appreciate this opportunity to travel and study in a foreign land. Suggest they read Astrid Jirka’s article on Sustainable Travel and Study Abroad or adapt Middlebury’s list of Sustainability Resources for Students Studying Abroad.

There are zillions of good resources to help students understand and measure their carbon footprints and this will likely be the topic of a future blog post. Living Routes asks students to upload their itineraries and estimated ground travel onto a GoogleDoc spreadsheet that automatically estimates their individual and collective carbon footprints. We use this information to educate students about their environmental impacts and pursue our Carbon Conscious strategy.

3) Make students aware of contrasting cultural norms and practices and their corresponding environmental impacts.

Given that the U.S. has one of the largest ecological footprints of any country, students can study just about anywhere and lower their impacts simply by adopting local cultural norms and practices such as conserving water, air drying clothes or (God forbid!) doing away with toilet paper.

Some articles Living Routes has used to support students awareness of their “cultural baggage” include Richard Slimbach’s "[Mindful Traveler]"(http://www.livingroutes.org/students/india/program_readings/Mindful_Trav...), Peggy McIntosh’s famous "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" and the Ethical Traveler’s "Thirteen Tips for the Accidental Ambassador."

4) Provide student opportunities to reduce and/or offset their impacts.

Once measured, it is important to explore ways to reduce and/or mitigate student’s environmental impacts. While also worthy of a blog post, a good place to start is the Green Passport, which invites students to commit to specific eco-actions while studying abroad and to connect virtually with other students who have taken a similar pledge. Costa Rican Trails also has a good list of environmental Tips for Travelers.

Several years ago, I developed a Carbon Commitment Calculator, which we have used to encourage Living Routes’ students to make lifestyle changes that reduce their carbon footprint. Then, I found Climate Culture, which takes this concept to a whole new level, including the ability to create “avatars” and virtual worlds that evolve as you become “greener." You can set up groups for students to work together to reduce their programs’ impacts.

While our emphasis should always be on reducing emissions, we’ll never get them to zero. So, what should we do about these remaining emissions? Living Routes has developed a fund, which we continually add to based on each program’s emissions (at $15/mT CO2e). We use this fund to support ecovillage-based carbon mitigation projects. Examples include solar energy (PV systems, solar cookers, solar thermal systems, solar refrigeration, etc.), afforestation/reforestation, biogas, wind power, and Earth-building.

5) Provide opportunities for students to pursue meaningful and socially responsible engagement with the local community.

Encourage students to walk, bike or take public transportation and to shop locally. Arrange opportunities for students to live (and spend time!) with local host families to help them understand and integrate into the local culture.

Service learning provides further opportunities for students to engage with and give back to their local host communities. They get to work on real-life problems, apply what they’ve been learning, and become active local citizens. The National Service-Learning Clearinghouse is an excellent resource on this topic and I intend to write a future blog post on criteria that Living Routes has developed to make sure such opportunities are as sustainable as possible.

These are just a few ways to bring sustainability more into the curriculum and daily lives of students while studying abroad, but it is by no means an exhaustive list. Please add your ideas, suggestions and questions in the comments so we can further develop this topic together. Thanks!

Below is the first installment of a four-blog mini-series, reposted from the Sustainability Education blog of Living Routes Director Daniel Greenberg. Stay tuned for the next three installments, which will be published in the AASHE blog over the next three weeks.

Contrary to common opinion, I believe studying abroad – anywhere – promotes sustainability. But we need to go further. With climate change and peak oil looming, I believe all study abroad programs, not just those with a sustainability focus like Living Routes, need to adopt higher standards of sustainable practices. But what do these standards look like?

From ’08-’10, I had the privilege of Chairing the Subcommittee on Sustainability Standards for The Forum on Education Abroad. Our mission was to review their Standards of Good Practice and Code of Ethics documents and suggest revisions through the lens of environmental and social responsibility. In this blog mini-series I will flesh out four identified strategies, using Living Routes as a case study:

• Program Design and Management
• Student Learning
• Staff Training and Office Management
• Promotion

Let’s start with Program Design and Management. The question we are asking here is:

“How does a study abroad organization consider the safety and welfare of the staff, community, and local environment in the design, management and termination of its programs?”

We came up with five main ideas:

1) Solicit local community and institutional input and integrate local values and practices into program design and management when appropriate.

For example, site directors might explore using Appreciative Inquiry and principles of Public Participation during program development to identify and incorporate local norms, such as community celebrations honoring our relationship with the natural world or common practices of reducing, re-using, and recycling precious resources.

With Living Routes, the whole point of our programs is to integrate students within communities that model sustainable values and practices. Whether it is getting around on bicycles, exchanging goods in the local free store, or taking time to express gratitude before a meal, students learn about sustainability by living it.

2) Utilize local experts, instructors, and other community resource individuals and groups when practical.

It's vital that directors prioritize community engagement and involve local stakeholders at all levels when designing programs. There are too many stories of universities buying up tracts of land to create satellite campuses with little to no local input in their design.

Living Routes is proud to almost exclusively hire local faculty and staff to manage our programs. These local experts know the community and culture better than anyone and their salaries remain in-country, further supporting the local economy.

3) Seek out opportunities to utilize goods and services that are locally-sourced and environment-friendly and strive to work with vendors who are socially, environmentally and economically responsible.

From transportation to supplies, from accommodations to food, directors can make informed purchasing decisions that support the local economy and environment. How about committing to purchase only Fair Trade products when available? With food in particular, there are lots of resources about how to buy local and develop sustainable food purchasing policies. Let’s challenge our students to maintain a 100 Mile Diet and support organic producers! It is also useful to develop a vendor code of conduct (e.g. Fairmount Minerals or SAP) so practices can be maintained even with staff turnover.

Ecovillages’ commitment to living well and lightly typically translates to being local and health-conscious. For example, students on Living Routes programs generally eat organic produce from farms within or associated with their host communities and residences are typically made out of local materials such as keet, earth bricks, or – at Findhorn in northern Scotland – out of recycled whisky barrels!

4) Have a defined system for regularly evaluating and reducing its programs’ harmful environmental and social impacts.

Ask for student feedback about program impacts in end-of-program evaluations. Begin to audit program CO2 emissions and mitigation efforts. Include environmental and social impact criteria in regular site reviews. Sustainable Travel International’s Checklist and the University of Washington’s Exploration Seminar Program Policy on Sustainability, Responsibility and Conservation are good places to get ideas.

Living Routes has a well articulated Carbon Consciousness strategy that I will describe in more detail in a future post. In 2007, we also began asking students to respond to pre-, post-, six-month post- and two-year post-surveys that explore students sustainability-related beliefs and behaviors. Our intention is to discover the long-term impact of our programs on students lifestyle choices.

5) Use resources to strengthen collective assets such as local schools, libraries, health programs, or land and water conservation projects.

What are programs giving back to the communities that support them? Not only do such support build strong working relationships, they are excellent opportunities for students to engage in service learning and work side-by-side with local residents. For examples of potential projects, check out the Geotourism Challenge and the Community Toolbox.

At Living Routes, we have commissioned solar cookers and supported local students to join our programs in Senegal; helped develop an electric rickshaw prototype in India; built a recycling shed in Mexico and an EcoCentre in Peru; and planted trees just about everywhere we go.

These are just a few ideas for how to design and manage study abroad programs that take their social and environmental impact into account. What did I miss? What are you doing on your programs that you would like to share with others? This is all a work in progress, so please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments. Thanks!

In my next post, I will explore ways study abroad programs can further incorporate sustainability into their curricula and student learning opportunities.

In community,
- Daniel

This is the second article from Brad McAllister, one of this month’s guest bloggers. Brad's first article about the sustainability “groundhog” cycle that keeps campus from advancing sustainability is available here.

“You Stay on Your Side of Campus and I’ll Stay on Mine”

There is a sense of academic segregation on many of today’s campuses. Business students tend to be on one side of campus and science students tend to be on the other. Public policy/non-profits are somewhere in-between and students of the arts are housed in a completely different place. On larger campus settings the students may not even share the same library, let alone the same social circle and extracurricular scene.

Looking through the lens of sustainability, this is cause for concern. A central tenet of sustainability is collaboration, which includes multidisciplinary integration of holistic systems thinking. In other words, its about getting a bunch of heads with different backgrounds, skills and priorities around a table to develop a solution for the common good. However, on today’s campuses most students, faculty and staff don’t have regular opportunities to learn from and support the intellectual growth of their fellow peers.

This missing piece appears when new alumni enter the workforce lacking multidisciplinary problem solving experience. Considering its impact on sustainability, imagine how a lack of collaboration experience can cause business to perform unsustainably. This simple skill is becoming increasingly desirable as corporations, SMEs and governments are prioritizing sustainability and looking for solutions from the next generation employee base.

So how do you go about breaking down this barrier? Whether you’re a student looking to catalyze your peers or staff tasked with integrating sustainability on campus, the process is the same.

First: Conduct an Inventory to find out what collaboration already looks like.
Reach out to your Student Development office and get a list of the student groups currently registered on campus. Determine what their membership looks like in terms of majors and academic years. Look for those who seem to be attracting students from various backgrounds. Ask the more diverse groups how they are attracting students. Are they using service-based projects or are they relying on social events? If you have the resources, inventory specific courses that are multidisciplinary in nature. This inventory process will also help you in achieving a few STARS points under the Curriculum credit category.

Second: Identify Gaps - In your inventory process you should discover some major silos. For example you might find an environmental advocacy group made up of environmental science students trying to engage a local company. Likely lacking in this group is a MBA candidate with the ability to navigate the real world concerns of a profit driven company. Similarly you might find a group focused on “green” entrepreneurship but doesn’t have a member from outside the business school. On the other hand, you may identify collaborative opportunities that work. Dive into the successful programs and uncover what works. I can’t tell you exactly what they are. Each campus culture is different.

Third: Share with them what you have learned, by going to them - Resist the urge to set up a single meeting and invite all the student groups that you are targeting. Turnout will be spotty at best. You must go to them, one at a time and on their grounds. Begin by asking for 15 minutes on the agenda at one of their meetings. Use this as an opportunity to redefine sustainability as the triple bottom line, making a clear case that it includes environmental, social and economic dimensions, and the reasons it is important to them (i.e. career skills, legacy and the coolness factor). This is your chance to inspire.

After the meeting be sure to follow-up. Students are notorious for not following up. Once you have secured a few leaders from each of the groups then set up a meeting to get the groups (or just the leaders of the groups) around the table together. Facilitate the discussion but don’t lead it. Paint a picture of the opportunity and then let the students’ creativity run with it.

To summarize, it’s a three-step process. First, inventory. Second, identify gaps. Third, share what you have learned by GOING TO the students.

Now that you have a better understanding of what the playing field looks like its time to call the right plays. This begins with proper and effective messaging, which happens to be the topic of my next post. Check back next week.

-Brad McAllister is the Co-Founder and Director of WAP Sustainability Consulting in Chattanooga Tennessee. Brad is also an Adjunct Professor of Sustainability at the Institute for Sustainable Practice at Lipscomb University.