PBIO 4800 - Sustainable Community Solutions - a Study Away Experience

• Students will be able to critically state, describe, and consider a problem facing a rural community in a non-industrialized nation, such as food security, access to energy infrastructure, and natural habitat degradation.
• Students will be able to use information from sources with enough interpretation/evaluation to develop a comprehensive analysis or synthesis of the environmental and economic challenges facing a rural community and strengths in meeting challenges.
• Students will be able to systematically and methodically analyze their assumptions about problem-solving capacity of a rural community, with careful evaluation of the relevance of context.
• Students will be able to state a position on needs and opportunities to advance sustainability in a low-income, non-industrialized community that is thoughtful, recognizes complexities, and acknowledges limitations.
• Students will be able to state conclusions and related outcomes of a proposed solution that advances sustainability using feedback from community members, logically and in a priority order.
• Students will be able to connect relevant experience in the field and academic knowledge about climate change, renewable energies, resource conservation, and leadership development.
• Students will be able to make connections across disciplines and perspectives, including natural resource use, engineering solutions, and civic engagement.
• Students will be able to adapt and apply skills, abilities, and methodologies for sustainable development gained in the study away setting to a diversity of communities in the U.S. and abroad.
• Students will be able to communicate how rural communities can advance sustainability, using their own experiences in the field.
• Students will be able to demonstrate a developing sense of self as a learner of sustainability and global issues, building on diverse prior experiences to respond to challenges faced by a rural community in Central America.