Achievement

We held a one-day faculty/student evaluation in June 2008 at the end of our first year of the CHANGE graduate certificate program. As a result of the discussions and feedback from that evaluation, our coursework for the second year of training was substantially revised. In particular we 1) instituted a CHANGE retreat in which the prior year’s IGERT cohort provided training and orientation for the new cohort, and 2) refined three instructional cases (tropical deforestation, water in the Middle East, and global climate change) that were presented as examples of modeling research in our first semester, and then as examples of place-based ethnographic research in our second semester. Student and faculty feedback confirmed that this revision helped students better understand links between these different scales of research.