��̽̽ - CUPS

��̽̽ a Finalist for National Community Engagement Award for Connecting Cultures Program

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 20:34:38 +0000

In recognition of its extraordinary community engagement initiatives, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today named ��̽̽ a regional winner of the 2020 W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Award. As a regional winner, ��̽̽ will compete for the national C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Scholarship Award, which will be announced in November. Other finalists for the award are the University of Memphis, The Ohio State University and the University of Utah.

The C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Scholarship Award includes a sculpture and $20,000 prize. The three other regional winners will each receive a cash prize of $5,000.

��̽̽ was honored for its Connecting Cultures program, established by Psychology professor Karen Fondacaro and her colleagues in Clinical Psychology in 2007 to serve refugees and survivors of torture. Over the last decade, a significant number of refugees have resettled their lives in Vermont. Often these individuals have experienced trauma, with far-reaching effects impacting not just a given individual, but even their extended families and communities.

“The Connecting Cultures program epitomizes the contribution ��̽̽ can make to Vermont and Vermonters as part of its 21^st century land-grant mission,” said ��̽̽ president Suresh Garimella. “We’re very proud of Dr. Fondacaro and her colleagues and of the groundbreaking, nationally acclaimed program they developed. They are deeply deserving of this honor.”

Connecting Cultures serves the refugee community through a clinical-science specialty service using a multidisciplinary, evidence-based model of mental health intervention. The program, which has served over 1,000 refugees and survivors of torture, works in close partnership with the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, which serves all refugee communities, and other refugee groups.

Connecting Cultures’ research with Vermont’s refugee community has led to eight peer-reviewed publications, over 100 local, national and international presentations, a Tedx Talk and a language-free mobile mental health application for refugees. Graduate and undergraduate students are engaged in Connecting Cultures through research, practicums, and internships. Students also participate in multi-disciplinary teams with psychologists, social workers, physical therapists, attorneys, and refugee advocates. Faculty and partners share the outcomes of the service, outreach, teaching and research through a variety of outlets, including the National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs and the Association of Psychology Training Clinics with the goal of improving mental health services for refugees and survivors of torture across the country.

“Amid the pandemic, the nation’s public universities have risen to the challenge to meet their communities’ needs in a major way,” said APLU President Peter McPherson. “That community engagement is at the heart of their mission and we’re thrilled to elevate institutions that have a longstanding commitment to being at the forefront of community engagement efforts. We congratulate this year’s Magrath Award finalists and exemplary designees for a job extremely well done and for their ongoing work in support of their communities.”

Since 2007, APLU and the Engagement Scholarship Consortium, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, have partnered to honor the engagement scholarship and partnerships of four-year public universities. The award recognizes programs that demonstrate how colleges and universities have redesigned their learning, discovery, and engagement missions to deepen their partnerships to achieve broader impacts in their communities. The national award is named for C. Peter Magrath, APLU president from 1992 to 2005. The three other regional winners will each receive a cash prize of $5,000 to further their engagement work.

The community engagement awards also include a class of exemplary designees. The University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Louisville, Purdue University, and Virginia Tech are all exemplary designees receiving recognition for outstanding efforts. All institutions will be showcased at the virtual 2020 Engagement Scholarship Consortium’s Annual Conference in October.

A team of community engagement professionals from public research universities judged this round of the award. A second team will pick the national winner following presentations at the 2020 National Engagement Scholarship Conference.

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Professor Karen Fondacaro. (Photo and video: Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist)

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Students Helping Students “Thrive” During Covid-19, Final Exams and Beyond

Anonymous — Fri, 01 May 2020 18:15:58 +0000

Final exam week can be a stressful time for many students, and with added challenges brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, it’s never been more important to help students succeed. While ��̽̽ provides a number of resources to support student health and wellbeing, a group of students have spent the semester developing and curating practical tips for coping with disconnection and stress: the ��̽̽ Thrive Guide.

The project began nearly two years ago as the cornerstone of a social media marketing course in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, CDAE 112: Social Media Theory 2 Practice. The guide provides evidence-based advice in the form of blog posts, podcasts and social media designed to help first-year students navigate stressors of transitioning to college and during finals week. It has taken on a new significance since the outbreak of covid-19, which has left students and individuals everywhere seeking new ways to connect.

“We want to help students progressively work on their health, especially in times of stress,” said Cian Duffy, a public communication senior and teaching assistant for the course. “We want them to feel like it’s doable and show them little things they can add to their schedule that can help them.”

For Students, By Students

“We’re just like you, college students trying to figure out what life is like in this new normal during quarantine and this time of social distancing,” explained sophomore public communication major Adrian Pastor on the Thrive Guide podcast.

The ��̽̽ Center for Health and Wellbeing, the university’s central hub for supporting student health and wellbeing, has continued to provide services and virtual programs since the transition to remote learning. The Thrive Guide aims to be a supplemental resource with content created by students for students, based on their personal experiences.

In addition to fostering peer-to-peer support, the Thrive Guide teaches students in the course, many of whom aspire to careers in public communication, how to run an effective social marketing campaign. Within the classroom environment, the students operate as a media publishing group, learning how to work in teams on a real-world project. Lecturer Matt Dugan says that by teaching students how to “sell happiness”, they can use the same techniques to sell almost anything.

“Social marketing is the concept of selling something that’s pro-social, pro-environmental or pro-health. We’re not just running a social media thing, but teaching students how to operate in the real world,” explained Dugan. At the same time, he emphasized the importance of evidence-based communications. “If you truly want to create behavior change, you need to use the science of persuasion.”

Meaningful Experience

Before creating their campaign strategy and content, students spend the first portion of the semester reading journalist Johann Hari’s best-selling book, “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions,” in which he suggests the causes of depression are often rooted in disconnections with oneself, with other and with nature.

Using lessons from the book, combined with supplemental research of their own, the students spend the rest of the semester designing a social marketing campaign with evidence-based content to help students destress and reconnect. The class is broken into writing, podcast, website, graphics and project management teams, which collaborate to produce multimedia content for the Thrive Guide website, podcast and social media.

This semester, the students quickly adapted to the coronavirus outbreak focusing on topics like, “Exercising During Quarantine,” “Ways to Reconnect with Nature,” and “Staying Sane During a Pandemic.”

“We learned that not everything always goes to plan,” said public communication senior Julia Ciotti, who took the class last spring and returned this year as a teaching assistant. “Even as things are different from last year, it’s been rewarding to move our vision forward and set this up as something that can continue for years.”

As Ciotti, along with several of her peers, head into the job market after graduation, the Thrive Guide provides a tangible portfolio piece and experience they can draw upon in conversations with future employers.

“I’m really grateful that I’m leaving this class with a lot of learning, because it is so real-world based,” said senior psychology major Kate McAllister. “It’s enabled me to take all of these cool things I’ve learned in textbooks and in class and actually apply them. I’m walking away with something very real-world and very valuable."

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Students in CDAE 112: Social Media Theory to Practice have spent the semester developing and curating practical tips to help students reconnect with themselves, with others and with nature. (Photo: Anna Georgsdottir)

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From Train Wrecks to Social Distancing

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 15:03:41 +0000

In 2015, when an Amtrak train went off the rails in a Vermont forest, officials at the state of Vermont contacted Jarlath O’Neill-Dunne, director of ��̽̽’s Spatial Analysis Lab. Within two hours, he and his team were flying drones overhead, sending out photos of the wreck to help with recovery. “We’ve been using drones for disaster response in Vermont for a while,” he says, from floods to wildfires. ”They give us new capabilities to help people make more informed, better decisions.”

Now the ��̽̽ team hopes the overhead views from their advanced drones can play a part in preventing a public health disaster: they’re volunteering to help the City of Burlington’s parks department monitor the usage of parks during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering a bird’s-eye view of how well social-distancing guidelines are being followed during peak-use periods.

Vermont Governor Phil Scott ’80 issued a “stay home, stay safe,” order on March 24. Soon after, ��̽̽’s O’Neill-Dunne and Adam Zylka ’14 offered to share video footage recorded at some of the most popular parks in Burlington, including Oakledge, the bike path, A-Dog Skatepark, and Leddy Park.

“During the early days of the governor's orders, it gave us a good ‘snapshot’ in time to identify how some of our larger regional parks were being used,” says Sophie Sauve, a parks planner for the city. Burlington Parks also established a Parks Ambassador program to have their own staff collect data on how parks are being used and to work with the community on how to best maintain social distancing in parks and other public spaces.

“Our objective is to keep parks open and the drone footage was one of the tools we used in assessing next steps as we navigate the governor's orders,” Sauve says.

The Spatial Analysis team, part of ��̽̽'s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, has made five drone flights over the past few weeks. Undergraduate Jillian Joubert ’20, working remotely from home, leads an effort that pulls the video into an easy-to-use web app. By accelerating the footage, ten or fifteen minutes of overhead action—walkers and bikers zipping along a path, skaters taking laps in the skatepark—can be compressed into a few seconds.

“We can cover a really large area at peak times and give the parks staff another tool to gauge how things are going,” says O’Neill-Dunne, a fellow in ��̽̽'s Gund Institute. “For the most part, the video seems to show that people in Burlington have been doing a good job with social distancing.” And, over time, this collection of videos may give city leaders an unusual view of how patterns of behavior may be changing in Burlington’s popular parks as the world health crisis moves toward summer.

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��̽̽ drone team helps Burlington with overhead view of parks

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Our objective is to keep parks open and the drone footage was one of the tools we used. — Sophie Sauve, planner, Burlington Parks

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A drone's-eye-view of Burlington's Oakledge Park offers city officials a measure of adherence to social distancing in the local parks. (Photo: ��̽̽ Spatial Analysis Lab)

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Policy in Action

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 13:26:06 +0000

Anyone who has made a trip to Pho Dang Vietnamese Café in Essex Junction might recall the tasty pho noodles, sweet iced coffee or low-key atmosphere. What they likely won’t think about is whether they paid for their meal with cash or a credit card.

That’s because Pho Dang, like many small businesses around Vermont, has moved away from being a “cash only” operation and invested in a credit card processing terminal, sparing many customers a trip to the ATM. To acquire the necessary terminal, owner Dong Dang entered into a lease agreement with a company that leases the equipment in 2017.

Within six weeks of signing the lease, he noticed higher than anticipated charges on his bank statement and placed a call to the Vermont Attorney General’s Consumer Assistance Program, a partnership with ��̽̽. Danielle Shaw, then a graduate student in ��̽̽’s Master of Community Development and Applied Economics program, answered the phone.

“He was going to be paying $6,200 over the course of four years to lease a product he could have bought new for $300-$500 at most,” says Shaw, who served as the Consumer Assistance Program’s graduate assistant.

Housed within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at ��̽̽, the Consumer Assistance Program, commonly referred to as CAP, helps Vermont consumers resolve conflicts with businesses, protect themselves from fraud and deal with a host of other consumer protection issues.

Since the early 1980s, CAP has functioned as the primary constituent services arm of the Attorney General’s Office, while also providing a unique learning environment for ��̽̽ students. Undergraduate students can earn up to six credits by enrolling in the Consumer Assistance Program practica administered by the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, where they work as consumer advocates on the frontlines of CAP’s consumer hotline. The course is co-taught with help from Attorney General T.J. Donovan himself.

Kathryn Pfefferle ’18 participated in the CAP program as a public communication major at ��̽̽. After graduating last May, she was hired to stay on as a full-time consumer associate and now supervises students in the practicum.

“The first thing I learned was a lesson in transgenerational communication – how to communicate with Vermonters and communicating what needs to be said in the appropriate way. I had no idea the types of skills that were needed for a phone call,” said Pefferle, adding that CAP receives many calls from elderly and vulnerable populations in the state.

On any given day, students may receive calls from consumers who are cold because they’ve run out of propane, or are afraid because they’ve accidentally given their password to a scammer, or feel they’ve been duped by a company. Last year, CAP handled more than 12,000 constituent contacts and recovered more than $124,000 for Vermont consumers.

Not all the calls CAP receives relate to consumer issues. “We joke that people call us because we answer the phone,” says Charity Clark ‘97, chief of staff to the Vermont Attorney General, who oversees the program. “With those non-consumer calls, the core of what we do is help people navigate government. It’s such an important service.”

CAP volunteers get a crash course in conflict resolution, consumer law and how government functions by assisting consumers in formalizing their complaints or referring them to other agencies of government as appropriate. At the same time, “they’re learning the ethics of public service,” says Sarah Anders, who replaced Shaw as the CAP graduate assistant last year.

Working with Vermonters around the state gives students direct experience in advocacy and policy work and has influenced the career trajectories for several graduates, like Cameron Randlett ’17, who, after finishing the practicum, stayed on to work at CAP part-time while finishing his degree in political science.

“I learned how to read, write and think critically from my political science degree, but really practical things – like how to manage an inbox, how to communicate effectively, how to stay on task when a billion different things are going on – I learned from CAP. All of those skills gave me the ability to be successful in my job,” says Randlett, who now works as a paralegal at a San Francisco-based immigration law firm and has his eyes on law school.

“I still really like consumer protection law. The CAP program was the first time in my life that I connected with the feeling that I did something that mattered, had a purpose. I think I’d like to do that ultimately in the long-term,” he says.

Since the early 1980s, CAP has functioned as the primary constituent services arm of the Attorney General’s Office. Undergrads earn up to six credits through the Consumer Assistance Program practica; the course is co-taught by Attorney General T.J. Donovan (left) and his chief of staff Charity Clark ’97 (right).

Taking Action

A ninth-generation Vermonter and descendent of Thomas Chittenden, Vermont’s first governor, Charity Clark’s Vermont roots are older than the state itself. After graduating from ��̽̽, she went on to Boston College Law School and spent some time in New York before coming back to work in the service of her home state.

Clark, who splits her time between Montpelier and Burlington, was at ��̽̽ the day Danielle Shaw received the call from Pho Dang owner Dong Dang. By the time she had been briefed by Shaw, she was fuming. Dang was not the first to call the consumer hotline about the credit card terminal issue. In recent years, students managing the CAP phone lines had already received a number of complaints from other small businesses in the state who had fallen victim to similar predatory lease agreements. After hearing Dang’s case – the most egregious yet – Clark knew something had to be done.

“The leases made me so mad. We decided that a legislative solution would be most effective,” she said. She reached out to legislators and worked with the state legislative council on a bill that would require more disclosures about lease terms and a 45-day right of cancellation for credit card terminal leases.

With a magnifying glass in hand, Clark presented the bill to the Vermont legislature explaining the ways in which the leasing companies were taking advantage of Vermont small business owners, such as including important disclosure language in fine print nearly illegible to the naked eye. Among the bill’s first sponsors was Senator Chris Pearson ’95, who Clark had coincidentally run into in ��̽̽’s Morrill Hall the day she’d learned about Dang’s call. “I was passionately pitching our idea for a bill,” she says.

Clark also compiled a list of consumers who had filed complaints – owners of a yarn shop, car wash, bed and breakfast – all of whom agreed to testify in the House and Senate. “They were so effective,” said Clark. As a result of their testimony, the bill was expanded to address additional issues raised. The bill passed both houses in the Vermont legislature, was signed by the Governor, and Act 4 went into effect July 1, 2018.

For students like Pfefferle, who managed a credit card processing lease complaint from Mountain View Inn – one of the consumers who testified in the case – the experience provided unique exposure to how the legislative process works – a handy lesson for someone aspiring to run for office herself one day.

“The power of individuals and the power of voice is something that can never be overlooked,” she says. “People have a lot more power than they think, especially when it comes to local government. It doesn’t take a superhero.”

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Helping Vermont consumers, students gain advocacy experience

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On any given day, students in the Consumer Assistance Program help Vermonters resolve conflicts with businesses, protect themselves from fraud and deal with a host of other issues. Last year, CAP handled more than 12,000 constituent contacts and recovered more than $124,000 for consumers. Kathryn Pfefferle ’18 (standing) supervises students in the practicum. “The power of individuals and the power of voice is something that can never be overlooked,” she says. “People have a lot more power than they think.” (Photos: Andy Duback)

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��̽̽ Program Turns Local Farms into Learning Laboratories

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 18:09:12 +0000

Senior environmental studies major Nell Carpenter is holding court, in a friendly, peer-to-peer kind of way, with eight fellow students in her PSS 212, Advanced Agroecology class at Bread and Butter Farm in Shelburne, where the group will be taking soil samples as part of a weekly on-farm lab that's a feature of the course.

Clipboard in hand, Carpenter lays out the plan for the day. “We’ll be bagging three cups for every two-acre sample site, as well as taking penetrometer readings everywhere that you do a core, a six-inch core, as well as moisture meter readings,” she says.

The students hang on her words.

Carpenter’s impressive command, and her fellow students’ attentiveness, didn’t just happen. They’re the product of a carefully thought-through redesign of PSS 212 prompted by the Engaged Practices Innovations (EPI) Grants program, an innovative University of Vermont initiative that is systematically making student learning at the university deeper, more impactful – and often more fun.

The EPI program encourages faculty members in all disciplines to apply for grants from the Office of the Provost that allow them to rethink and rebuild their courses around a series of “high impact practices,” teaching approaches – like students partnering with faculty on research projects – that studies have shown inspire and motivate them to learn more deeply.

Since the program was created in 2015, 15 EPI grants have been awarded in academic disciplines ranging from classics and Asian studies to physics and wildlife biology, as well as in Student Affairs and Residential Life. Based on the impact evaluations they require, the grants are having just the positive effect on engaged teaching and learning and the student experience they were designed to inspire.

EPI has had a transformative effect on PSS 212 and its work with five Vermont farms, including Bread and Butter, ��̽̽’s Catamount Farm, Diggers' Mirth Farm, The Farm Between and Jericho Settlers Farm.

Something missing

Plant and Soil Science professor Ernesto Mendez has taught the seniors-only advanced course for 10 years. It always gave students an opportunity to learn the foundational principles of agroecology – that agricultural land should be viewed as an ecosystem and the people who work the land as part of a social fabric, both of which deserve respect and care – not only in a classroom setting but also on local farms.

But there was always something missing.

A key tool Mendez wanted his students to acquire in the class, ideally through first-hand, on-farm experience, was a foundational element in his own work called participatory action research, or PAR, where researchers collaborate on an equal footing with the people they’re studying to make sure the work has value for both parties.

The problem? Participatory action research requires participation, and the farmers weren’t interested.

“I had asked them, there's a possibility we could be doing something of value for you,” says Mendez. “But they had always been like, you know, the labor is great in terms of the benefit we get, and we like the students,” but the research itself wasn’t a priority.

And while the class did feature student research, in the form of soil testing on the farms, the farmers’ lack of engagement robbed it of its power.

“When you create an artificial research project, so the students are just learning how to collect data, it's not that meaningful,” Mendez says.

After years of watching students do soil tests, the farmers’ position evolved. Two years ago, they decided research would be an effective tool in addressing some of the challenges they were facing.

Specifically, they asked if the students could help them gauge the health of their soil over time, establishing a baseline in year one, then measuring it annually each year with a new crop of students.

That represented a great opportunity for Mendez and his students – but also an intimidating responsibility.

Could farmers trust the accuracy of the data students were collecting, which could drive business decisions affecting their livelihoods?

The salience of that question hit home after a pilot version of the course in 2017 yielded data that Mendez knew was not up to snuff.

Mob activity

Soil health was a topic of interest for all five farms the students visit weekly in teams of six to eight, especially so for Bread and Butter Farm, which produces organic vegetables and grass-fed beef and pork the farmers sell locally.

Owner Corie Pierce and land-manager Brandon Bless practice a form of land management called mob grazing, which mimics the behavior of the wild ruminant herds of buffalo, elk and deer that once roamed the Great Plains.

“The animals played this important role of walking through, fertilizing, eating just a little bit, trampling the rest of it as mulch and moving on,” which created some of the most fertile land on earth, with “topsoil several feet deep,” Pierce says.

For the past nine years, the farmers – with Bless taking the lead the past three – have practiced just this kind of intensive rotational grazing, moving their cows, and the enclosing fences with them, up to four times each day.

While the farmers know intuitively that the practice has enriched and restored their pastureland – an end in itself in agroecology, but also a means of a creating nutrient-dense diet for their herd – they have a clean slate with a new piece of land they’ll be managing that’s much in need of revival after years of dairying, haying and heavy machinery depleted and compacted the soil.

On the new land, the farmers are keen on using students to precisely measure the impact of mob grazing “on the depth of the soil and the species that are growing there,” Pierce says. She and Bless could then evaluate “how that translates to our animals' health and productivity.”

Flash of insight

The EPI program, and some old-fashioned creative thinking, were instrumental in guaranteeing the class delivered to Pierce and Bless and the other farmers accurate, reliable data – at the same time ramping up student engagement.

With the help of EPI funds, Mendez and several faculty colleagues, including Martha Caswell and Vic Izzo in Plant and Soil Science, Karen Nordstrom in the Environmental Program and Joshua Faulkner in ��̽̽ Extension, threw themselves into the PAR process, meeting regularly with the farmers to learn exactly what each wanted the student-led research program to accomplish. It is also paying for the analysis of soil samples that aren’t done at ��̽̽ and for a rigorous evaluation of the program’s impact on student learning – one of the requirements of an EPI grant.

But the biggest change came from a flash of insight – that the five talented students, including Carpenter, in the new Undergraduate Research Fellows program, who worked with Mendez research group, the Agroecology and Livelihoods Collaborative, could be redeployed.

“We started thinking about linking them to the program,” he says. “We would put one in charge of each farm and they would help the students collect the data. They’d get trained, connect with the farmers, set everything up and would be like team captains.”

That vision prompted Mendez and his team to apply for the EPI grant.

Checking it twice

It’s hard to imagine a better example than PSS 212 of the impact the EPI program can have on student engagement.

After Carpenter finished her information session with fellow students at the start of their lab at Bread and Butter Farm, the group descended on a greenhouse and engaged in a whirlwind of simultaneous soil testing activity: measuring the moisture content of the soil, gauging its pressure at depths of six and 12 inches, bagging soil samples just so at key spots for biological analysis later. Some students did the physical work, others acted as scribes taking down the measurements, still others checked the notetakers’ work for accuracy.

The due diligence – and academic engagement that came with it – is just what Mendez and his colleagues predicted would happen after the research took on real meaning.

For senior environmental studies major Harper Simpson, the knowledge that she’s making a real contribution is a powerful motivator.

“It gets our team on our toes, since we’re the baseline year, and that's pretty awesome,” she says. “It also makes me want to do well for Ernesto and his research results, as well as the farmers.”

But perhaps the greatest impact of a program designed to promote engaged student learning has been on the Undergraduate Research Fellows.

In weekly meetings of the five fellows, supported by off-the-cuff sessions with Caswell and Izzo, teaching assistant Katie Horner, a doctoral student in the collaborative, and Nordstrom, the fellows are learning soft skills like leadership, reflection and teamwork.

“There is this really cool dynamic between all of us, where we really are lifting each other up together,” Carpenter says. “We learn both about how to navigate these things as humans as well as learning about the material.”

Everyone knows about learning by doing, Carpenter adds, but the fellows program takes things a step further.

“It’s learning by teaching,” she says. “It's incredible. It's not something everyone might be interested in, but I think for the five of us and for myself personally it's a really incredible way to be steeped in this, as opposed to just having stacks of books on my conference table.”

In addition to Carpenter, Undergraduate Research Fellows include Lizzy Holiman, Food Systems and Ecological Agriculture; Emily McCarthy, Environmental Studies; Allie Pankoff, Environmental Science; and Elise Schumacher, Food Systems. The EPI program is funded and administered through the Office of the Provost. Learn more about the EPI Grant Program.

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Grant Program Helps Faculty Use “High Impact Practices” to Engage Students in Classes Ranging from Physics to Agroecology

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Students in an advanced agroecology class head for a greenhouse at Bread and Butter Farm to do soil testing. (Photo: Andy Duback)

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Office of Community-Engaged Learning (CELO)

Anonymous — Fri, 18 May 2018 15:37:15 +0000

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Map to Mongolia

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 17:02:15 +0000

On the eighth day, Simon McIntosh ‘17 got off his horse and started walking. He was exploring a roadless mountain pass in the northernmost corner of Mongolia, near the border of Russia. To his east, Lake Hovsgol stretched for more than eighty miles. “Some people call it the Blue Pearl,” he says. “It’s stunning around there—where the steppe grasslands and taiga forests meet the Siberian mountains.” In that region, nomadic Tsaatan people herd reindeer, and endangered ibex and Argali sheep roam. A few trucks and motorcycles meander through the grasses and mud. To cross the mountains, and descend into the Darkhad Valley, there is no improved road, only rough tracks.

“But that is changing,” McIntosh says. The Mongolian government has established new national parks in the area and built a paved road from the capital to Lake Hovsgol in 2013. There has been a sharp increase in the number of visitors to the region—bringing with them greater impacts on the land and opportunities for economic development. “In a grassy field, you’ll see tire tracks going in every direction,” McIntosh says. The government now aims to build a paved road from the lake over into the remote valley. “But the question is: where?” McIntosh says.

Route Finding

Helping to answer that question became McIntosh’s senior thesis—and took him to Mongolia for the summer of 2016. It was his second trip there to make maps in partnership with local park rangers and the Mongol Ecology Center. An environmental studies major in ��̽̽’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences—with a minor in geospatial technologies—McIntosh spent weeks trekking over five mountain passes with a Mongolian partner, and a pocketful of GPS equipment—“collecting data on the Garmin every fifty meters,” he says.

“It’s a beautiful and fragile place,” he says, “and I knew my research could make a difference.”

Most of his mapping outings were on horseback and lasted “three or four days,” McIntosh says. But, late in summer, he and his working partner, Orhan, set out for eight days. “Mongolian horse saddles are not as comfortable as European ones,” McIntosh recalls with a rueful laugh. He collected the data he needed, but his backside was so sore that “by the last day I was walking,” he says.

“A road has many implications,” McIntosh says. With support from the ��̽̽ Office of Undergraduate Research, a Simon Family Public Research Fellowship—and guidance from ��̽̽ professors Patricia Stokowski, Bob Manning, and Rick Paradis—McIntosh planned his independent research expedition. In the Darkhad Valley, he input observations on his smartphone about each of the five mountain passes, like soil type and slope. Then he applied a matrix tool—including input from conservationists, local officials, and nomadic herders—to make a recommendation about which route “could help the most people,” he says, “while also best protecting the land.”

His final report, which he shared with Mongolian leaders in the region, showed that two passes could be suitable. But that the southern Öl Pass might be the best choice for a road that “links rural communities, national parks, and indigenous routes for future tourism purposes,” McIntosh notes.

“Write a thesis or do an independent study. Find a project that is yours,” McIntosh suggests to incoming students. “You should look at college as something you do, rather than something that’s done to you.”

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McIntosh (left) spent weeks trekking over five Mongolian mountain passes as part of his senior thesis project, mapping the best routes for the region's first paved road. (Photos: Courtesy of Simon McIntosh)

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Five of McIntosh’s six mountain pass scenarios, drawn in red. Gray lines mark existing roads. (Map: Simon McIntosh 2016)

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Birding to Change the World

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 19:36:52 +0000

Professor Trish O’Kane’s new course, “Birding to Change the World,” began far from Derway Island in the north end Burlington, where, on an autumn afternoon, her class of ��̽̽ students tromps through a floodplain forest with a crew of kids from nearby JJ Flynn Elementary. In 2005, standing inside the soggy remains of her Hurricane Katrina-ravaged house, a safety respirator strapped on to protect herself from the toxic stew of destruction, she had a strong sense that things needed to change—in her own life and in the world.

That August, O’Kane and her husband had just moved to New Orleans so she could take a job as a journalism instructor at Loyola University, following ten years as an investigative journalist in Central America, exposing killings and other human rights abuses. Then the storm hit, pushing eleven feet of water through her living room. The soil became poisonous with benzene from oil spills, the air with asbestos from demolitions. Like so many of the city’s residents, “our house was bulldozed,” she says.

As she watched trashed buildings and toxic waste wash out into the Gulf of Mexico, O'Kane felt anguished and depressed. She saw how the storm had slammed low-income neighborhoods and disproportionately harmed African-Americans and other people of color. She also felt she didn’t sufficiently understand the water or the land or the creatures that lived there. “A new reality kept pouring in,” she says.

Budding birders

Eleven years later, O’Kane is walking along the edge of the Burlington bike path looking for birds with a group of students—some undergrads, some elementary. Tobey, a fourth-grader, points his binoculars overhead. He describes himself as a blue jay whisperer. “I can find them—fast,” he explains with a broad smile.

“Yes, he spotted three blue jays in about thirty seconds, before anyone else could see them,” says Sara Fergus a sophomore at ��̽̽. Tobey laughs out loud with obvious delight. Did he know he had this talent “before, say, today?” a reporter asks. “Nope,” he says, “but I do like blue jays.” Then he and Fergus pick out some gulls skimming the treetops.

��̽̽ professor Trish O’Kane and fifth-grader Yadiel on the bank of the Winooski River.

This newly minted jay whisperer and the college student are “bird buddies” in an after-school birding club at the school. Every Wednesday, they head out the side door of the school and walk more than a mile along the bike path to spend a couple of hours at Derway Island, a nature preserve. And for Fergus, the club’s weekly outings are the required lab—and heart—of Trish O’Kane’s new Environmental Studies course.

New Reality

Before Hurricane Katrina, O’Kane “never cared about birds,” she writes (in this New York Times essay). Afterwards, she began to wonder how birds survived, and to see them as teachers. Soon she had left New Orleans and returned to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to begin a PhD—pioneering new ways to teach about the links between ecological and social well-being.

In Madison, as a grad student, she created a Nature Explorers after-school club that connected more than one hundred Wisconsin undergrads with some 125 children at one of the city’s poorest middle schools. In 2015, she finished her degree and joined the ��̽̽ faculty in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. Now she’s working on the same model of teaching in Vermont, beginning by collaborating with staff at Flynn School to help connect ��̽̽ students with some of the diverse children who go there; Flynn's remarkable after-school program has students from more than thirty countries, including many refugee families.

Learning together

On the first day the club met this fall, most of the children took to birding immediately, but some worried about touching any dirt. “They thought they would get diseases,” Sara Fergus says. “We’re learning birds together and getting them more comfortable spending time outside. It’s a progression for everyone.” She explains how, in just a few weeks, some of the children went from concern about touching trees—to climbing them.

“Birding is a great way to connect with nature because birds are so connected with everything else,” says Nathaniel Sharp ’18, another ��̽̽ student who is taking this service-learning course. “Birds are accessible and exciting, whether you're seeing a bald eagle or pigeons.”

Or, on this fine blue-sky afternoon, a pair of beavers. Some dozen of the bird club members have just cheerfully hacked their way through a formidable thicket of stinging nettles, calling out birds they hear—“downy woodpecker!” “Was that a yellow-rumped warbler?”—and stopped to discuss the beauties (and slight terrors) of a very large spider tending its web. Now they have gathered on a steep riverbank overlooking the final bend of the Winooski River before it flows under the bike path bridge and out into Lake Champlain. A wet shiny nose emerges from the water. Then another nearby. “Whuump!” A loud tail-slap.

Yadiel, a fifth-grader, B. Freas, a senior majoring in Parks, Recreation and Tourism, and professor Trish O’Kane, all smile and watch the beavers closely. “Can you see its eyes? What color are they?” O’Kane asks Yadiel. The boy adjusts his binoculars and watches the beautiful faint V of one beaver swimming toward its lodge. “Black,” he says.

Spider spotted— "It's big!"—in the forest at Derway Island, a nature preserve in the Burlington's north end.

After Katrina

“In the long-term, what I’m really interested in is transformational justice,” O’Kane says. To get there requires some soul-work. “I want my college students to know that they can make a difference in the world. I see that many students who care about the environment are depressed or they are paralyzed,” she says. “I know how that feels because that's how I felt after Katrina.” But the birding course can bring them to more firm ground.

“What is the environment?” asks sophomore Sam Blair who is taking the course. “Let's go out and touch it and smell it. Let’s get to know a bit of nature and enjoy it.” As a “co-explorer” (O’Kane’s carefully chosen name for the undergrads in the birding club), Blair has been building stick forts in the floodplain forest on Derway Island with the Flynn students he is mentoring. “So much of the dialogue about the environment is about crisis and destruction,” he says. “It’s really disempowering to only hear about these huge global problems that you can’t do anything about.”

Hearing birds and climbing logs is a counterbalancing kind of environmental knowledge. “These college students are making a difference with a kid every week,” O’Kane says. “They’re building connections.”

Out and back

In the van driving back to campus from Flynn School, the ��̽̽ students discuss their homework. Every week, O’Kane has them gather two questions from their birding buddy and research them. Some of the questions this week: What’s the difference between a cricket and a grasshopper? How did Derway Island form? And can you make smoothies with wild grapes? Next week, the college students will provide a report tailored to a fifth-grade reader.

The conversation turns to readings from a recent lecture portion of their birding class: the provocative work of scholar Richard Louv and his exploration of “nature-deficit disorder” and “the criminalization of natural play.” Later, the undergraduates will reflect on what they have learned by writing in journals, and they'll make drawings of birds to help themselves and the Flynn students with their field ID skills. Then, next week, and on into winter, the ��̽̽ students will walk back out to the woods on Derway Island with their bird buddies to see how the world is changing.

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Fourth-grader Tobey has spotted a bald eagle, crows, and pileated woodpeckers in his after-school birding club at JJ Flynn Elementary School, Burlington, VT. Here he watches gulls over the bike path with his “bird buddy,” Sara Fergus, a sophomore enrolled in Environmental Studies 295, “Birding to Change the World.” (Photos: Joshua Brown)

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A Day in the Dirt

Anonymous — Wed, 04 May 2016 17:58:02 +0000

Anna Herman puts her hands down into the dirt and pulls out a large clump of grass. Behind an old motel on Shelburne Road, she and a crew of about twenty ��̽̽ students from professor Dan Baker’s project planning course are chopping through the sod, laying out wood-chip paths, selecting pea and carrot seeds, and turning over a rectangle of soil about the size of a tennis court.

They’re making a community garden -- and trying something new.

"This garden may the first model of its kind in the country," says Herman, ��̽̽ class of 2012, who took Baker's course several years ago -- and is now a staff person for the Champlain Housing Trust. This garden will serve the residents of Harbor Place, temporary housing for homeless people.

“We have people who've been here for several months, and we have people who are here for just one night,” Herman says. “That’s why this model of community gardening is completely different. Our guests often don’t know what tomorrow will bring or where they’ll be staying the next night, so the whole idea is to bring healthy food to the residents. The staff will have harvested food in the office -- and people can come out here whenever they want and eat something fresh.”

The ��̽̽ students spent the semester planning how to reclaim an overgrown site here at Harbor Place, a former Econo Lodge that has, itself, been reclaimed by the Champlain Housing Trust.

“The students designed a garden to meet the needs of this population,” explains Dan Baker, a researcher in ��̽̽’s Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, often called CDAE. “The crops that will be grown largely don't have to be cooked. They can be eaten raw since a lot of the rooms here don't have kitchens. And we're trying to find vegetables that kids would like.

"We're going to plant high-value foods that are wanted by the folks that live here,” Baker says, “like mesclun and baby lettuce.”

Professor Dan Baker selects seeds while ��̽̽ geography major Taylor Hancock '16, gets a sign ready for the snow peas. “There once was a garden here,” Hancock says, “but it was covered with brush and grass. We’re bringing it back, making it bigger.”

This work at Harbor Place was just one of many efforts in A Day in the Dirt, held on April 30, which had more than one hundred ��̽̽ students out working in some dozen community gardens all over Burlington and beyond—building fences, raising raised beds, planting peas, and, yes, getting dirty hauling dirt.

Service-Learning

The whole effort was led by Jess Hyman G’09, executive director of the Vermont Community Garden Network. “In total, we had about three hundred volunteers out this year,” Hyman says. “It engages people of all ages in positive activities that boost our local food system and strengthen community.”

Five ��̽̽ service-learning courses led projects over the weekend, including seniors in a capstone course in Public Communication who worked closely with Hyman over the semester to plan the Day in the Dirt; student leaders from this course have played a key role in organizing the event since it started in 2013. “This is what service-learning means,” says Susan Munkres, who leads ��̽̽’s office of Community-University Partnerships & Service Learning (CUPS), “students employing the skills they're gaining on behalf of community partners or contributing to the public good through their courses.”

“At the foundation, students help by, yes, digging the dirt,” Munkres says, “but service-learning goes far beyond providing volunteer labor to worthwhile events. There’s sometimes a misconception about that,” Munkres says. As students progress in service-learning courses, they can, for example, “become consultants, design publications, or plan marketing efforts,” she says, “and at the highest level, advanced students conceive and lead projects over multiple years on behalf of community partners.”

Jess Hyman agrees. “The students working in solidarity with Vermont Community Garden Network and other community organizations are doing projects that have real-world implications. It isn't just a labor pool -- and it isn’t just an academic exercise,” she said. “Service-learning has a huge impact in the community.” Which helps explain why 99 service-learning courses were offered this year at ��̽̽, involving more than 1,700 undergraduate students.

Students from several service-learning classes in ��̽̽’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources were also out in force for Day in the Dirt -- including sophomore Madeline Short who hauled and spread wood chips at the revived Lakeview South garden site, part of the City of Burlington's network of community gardens.

"It's fun to get outside and do some hard work," Short said, who was here as part of professor Christine Votovec’s course, Human Health and the Environment. "And it's great to accomplish something that's not just for yourself."

Rubenstein School grad student Eduardo Rodriguez and undergrad Toni Hall ’16.

At another Day in the Dirt site near Burlington’s waterfront railyard, is the recently opened, eponymous RAILYARD. “It’s an apothecary and herb clinic,” explains co-founder Kate Elmer Westdijk G’07, a food systems research specialist at ��̽̽ who teaches herbalism courses through the university’s Environmental Program. On an industrial corner outside the building, she and a team of ��̽̽ students in Natural Resources 206, Environmental Problem-Solving and Impact Assessment, made a plan for a series of planters and picnic tables.

“We want the outside of the building to reflect the values inside,” says environmental studies major Kristina Puris ’16 who helped lead the effort. Nearby, Rubenstein School grad student Eduardo Rodriguez and undergrad Toni Hall ’16, dump gravel. It will be used to anchor the team’s purple painted buckets. “Then we’ll fill them with soil and put in plants,” Hall says. “You’ll see; it will look a lot more beautiful.”

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Sophomore Madeline Short helps to build a community garden along North Avenue in Burlington. It's part of her service-learning course—and a Day in the Dirt. (Photo: Joshua Brown)

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Understanding Refugees' Reality

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 19:44:40 +0000

Early in the spring semester, Professor Susan Comerford tells the students in SWSS 055, “Working with Refugees,” her fundamental expectations for the social work course. Those expectations apply to the teacher as much as they do to the students: “If you leave this class with only an intellectual understanding, then I have not done my job. You need to understand this on a personal level.”

The “this” at question is the reality of the lives of refugees at home in a new land. As the world grapples with a refugee crisis of historic proportions, it is an apt time for college students to be gaining understanding of these issues. Perhaps not so apparent is the truth that Burlington, Vermont, circa 2016 provides a rich learning environment in this realm. Since 1989 more than 6,000 women, men, and children have started new lives in the Green Mountain State through the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. Their countries of origin are many — Burundi, Congo, Sudan, Russia, Iraq, Burma. The greatest concentrations have come in waves from Vietnam, Bosnia, Somalia and Bhutan.

And students could scarcely find a better guide into the lives of refugee communities than Susan Comerford. For the first phase of her adult life, nearly from the day she graduated with her undergraduate degree, Comerford worked directly with and for refugees. Initially that meant putting her basic EMT skills to use in refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border; later that experience would inform advocacy work on policy issues in Washington, D.C. Looking back, Comerford says she had no “visions of grandeur,” just a deep desire to help that turned into a focus for the next 14 years.

At one point during that phase of her life, a Catholic organization recruited Comerford to travel to every country in Asia that either produced or hosted refugees. Their goal: to get a sense of need and where best to deploy personnel. “It was one of those experiences where you’re incredibly excited and scared to death at the same moment,” she remembers. “When those two things come together, you know it’s something you can’t afford not to do.”

Standing before a classroom, Comerford projects seasoned calm and kindness. But not a kittens-in-clover sort of kindness; it’s a more serious strain. She calls her students “colleagues,” and makes it clear they are to speak up and make themselves heard. They are not in high school anymore.

In essence, Comerford’s “Working with Refugees” course begins with a satellite view of the planet and zooms down to street view across the months of the semester. Each student selects a region and a country within it. They research the circumstances that “gave rise to flight.” They explore the situation in the country of first asylum and eventual resettlement. “Most importantly,” Comerford says, “find a refugee narrative from that country and get a personal sense.”

Comerford says “being in solidarity with refugees didn’t end” when she joined the ��̽̽ faculty in 1998. Her connections in the Vermont refugee community are deep, helping facilitate the many service-learning projects that give students in the course direct experience working with new Americans through local schools, support agencies, community centers, and the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program itself.

As students reflect on the service-learning work they often focus upon distinct, personal experiences that brought home the reality of refugees’ lives. For Winny Kwong-Sito, it was witnessing a dramatic, life-pivoting moment for two Bhutanese families as they arrived at Burlington International Airport. For Eyob Gizachew, it was sensing quieter lessons of joining new communities as he became part of children’s daily routines at Champlain Elementary School.

��̽̽ undergrad Medina Serdarevic is from a refugee family herself. Working with students at the King Street Center, she would sometimes hear them greeting their parents in their native language at the end of the day. It came full circle, reminding her of her own first years in the United States. “I have learned so much in this class,” she says. “But one thing I’ll carry with me is the power that stories hold. Stories shape who we are. And by sharing them we are able to create relationships and help communities grow.”

While Serdarevic knows the reality of the refugee journey firsthand, Comerford hopes all of her student will dare to reflect on their own lives within that context. “You need to deal with the possibility that this could be your own reality someday,” she tells the class one afternoon. “These are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

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Service-learning is key to the social work course. Medina Serdarevic, whose own parents left Bosnia as refugees, has worked in the King Street Center after school program spring semester. (Photo: Andy Duback)

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����̽̽ a Finalist for National Community Engagement Award for Connecting Cultures Program

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