Highlight
Implementing CHANGE at UW-Madison
Achievement/Results
Our highlight from last year’s IGERT survey discussed our successful effort to create a new permanent graduate certificate program based on the themes of our IGERT. The resulting program – the Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment (CHANGE) received final approval from the University Academic Planning Council just after we sent in last year’s IGERT survey. This is one of only four graduate certificate programs offered by the Nelson Institute.
In the 2007-8 academic year we implemented the certificate program for the first time, recruiting graduate students from across the university and delivering four courses adapted specifically to our goal of developing sustainability scholars who are comfortable with applying insights from humanistic, natural science, and social science perspectives on sustainability. Students in our first cohort say that the communication skills they have been taught, and their new familiarity with multiple disciplinary perspectives on problems of sustainability and vulnerability, are helping them to refine and contextualize their graduate research. This provides us with confirmation that some our original goals for this IGERT are already being met after only two semesters of our three-semester training program.
Finally, the CHANGE program is designed to promote engagement between graduate students and the public, policy makers, and various research communities. A Fall 2007 pilot version of the CHANGE capstone course proved that this is a viable goal. Students in this class worked with representatives from the City of Madison, WI to understand the impact of proposals to use biofuels as part of the city’s effort to reduce it’s carbon emissions. They produced a presentation and summary report that showed members of the city’s Sustainable Energy and Design Committee how different scenarios of biofuel use would affect both the city’s carbon reduction targets and the regional environment. Not only were the members of the committee thrilled to get helpful analysis and advice, but the students were able to learn about how political context shapes the communication of research results.
Address Goals
Meeting NSF’s Strategic Learning Goal The courses in the CHANGE program are successfully teaching graduate students about the contributions of multiple disciplines to a working understanding of environmental sustainability. They are also learning about how politics and interests affect the communication and acceptance of research findings. Because they have these sophisticated perspectives on the research enterprise, our students are well prepared to promote their research findings in ways that foster wider understanding and appreciation of academic research.
Meeting NSF’s Strategic Discovery Goal Although our program is only one year old, it has already shaped the ways that our students are thinking about their research. Based on their self-reporting in reflective journals, and on focus groups conducted at the end of the semester, our trainees and associates have a sophisticated understanding of how disciplines other than their own can contribute to comprehensive research discoveries in sustainability science. We expect this to lead to innovative collaborative research as our cohorts of graduate students move through their graduate program.
