Vision, Mission, and Learning Objectives

Vision

The Environmental Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis seeks to develop and train socially conscious, civically engaged student leaders who are able to be environmental problem solvers and engage the world. We serve a wide range of students, including students who participate more deeply through an environmental major or minor and non-environmental majors who may take a single course from us.

Mission

The Environmental Studies Program serves all members of the university community by fostering environmental awareness, interdisciplinary inquiry and collaborative engagement. We seek to enable undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty to engage with each other and with the outside community regarding a range of environmental issues that overlap with issues of culture, equity and justice. Our courses and programs of study allow students to develop the skills necessary for addressing today's most pressing, systemic environmental challenges, and to understand how the impact of culturally diverse systems of thought influence environmental solutions. We provide an interactive and interdisciplinary experience for our students, through exposure to multiple perspectives and problem-solving approaches. Our course offerings are interdisciplinary, applied, experiential, project-based, community-engaged, and/or field-based. Our programming is built on courses offered by our program as well as stable and relevant course offerings in partner departments. Our curricula are scaffolded to allow gradual advancement and repeated practice. We provide opportunities for students to interact at the introductory level through foundational core courses and first-year experiences. At the more advanced level we provide skill-building courses that develop analytical skills, critical thinking skills, and writing abilities to approach real world environmental problems. Learning culminates with opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to participate in authentic interdisciplinary problem-solving through a variety of project-based capstone level classes and experiences that engage teams of students from across schools to work together on solutions to real-world local issues with community partners.

These goals apply to undergraduate students who participate in one of our associated environmental majors or interdisciplinary environmental minors as well as students taking environmental studies electives. Our goal for these students is that they will possess the knowledge, critical thinking, communication, and analytical tools to design and evaluate solutions to real world environmental challenges through research, practice, and community engagement. Our learning goals are organized following Fink’s taxonomy for significant learning experiences (Fink, 2013).

1. Foundational Knowledge
   1. Understand key biological, geological, chemical, and physical processes that govern environmental processes and functioning
   2. Understand the important political, economic, legal, social, cultural and historic context related to environmental issues
   3. Understand how people and organisms receive and process information about environmental issues
   4. Understand and appreciate the role of environmental inequities in society
2. Application
   1. Be able to develop an intellectual network and participate successfully in partnerships to address environmental issues.
   2. Articulate evidence-based opinions on environmental issues
   3. Possess analytical skills including interpreting, analyzing, synthesizing, or critiquing academic and applied documents and texts
   4. Be able to implement logical critical thinking processes such as scientific inquiry, problem-solving, decision-making, and design thinking
   5. Be able to effectively communicate orally and in writing across disciplinary lines and to a variety of audiences, demonstrating the ability to:
      1. Articulate logical, cohesive, concise written arguments with appropriate structure for the target audience, including both technical documents and email communication
      2. Communicate orally in both informal conversation and formal presentations
      3. Represent ideas, processes, functions, and relationships visually using graphics
      4. Listen to and communication with diverse audiences including collaborators, scientists, clients, community partners, and lay public
   6. Develop collaborative teamwork and project management skills including
      1. Ability to listen and to give, receive, and implement feedback; understand and navigate group dynamics
      2. Being able to identify the problem, figure out what is needed, know how to find information, identify tasks, set goals and milestones, delegate, execute, and monitor progress, and make flexible adjustments
3. Integration
   1. Disciplinary grounding
      1. Possessing a depth of knowledge and problem-solving approaches within one’s discipline
      2. Recognizing disciplinary boundaries and limitations
      3. Awareness of application: Understand how disciplinary work is influenced by and applies to environmental challenges
   2. Interdisciplinary competence
      1. Ability to recognize perspectives, problem-solving approaches, and analytical tools of other disciplines
      2. Ability to identify and apply appropriate concepts and tools from disciplines relevant to the problem at hand
      3. Ability to navigate disciplinary language and meaning
      4. Ability to design and evaluate solutions to environmental challenges, specifically by integrating different disciplinary insights or problem-solving approaches to produce understanding or product that is enriched by the integration
      5. Ability to tolerate the ambiguity, slow pace, and complexity of working on complex, real-world problems
   3. Ability to engage in systems thinking by analyzing complex systems across different domains (society, environment, economy) and across temporal and spatial (local to global) scales, considering non-linear cascading effects, feedback loops, cause-effect chains, and other features of dynamically complex, coupled social-ecological systems
4. Human Dimension and Caring
   1. Develop a sense of civic engagement and possess a desire to be engaged in one’s community
   2. Ability to see and understand human, cultural, and social dimensions of social-environmental issues, including understandings around power, equity, and justice
   3. Utilize skills in cultural competency when doing environmental work and engaging with others
   4. Possess a knowledge of systemic oppression, ability to analyze systems and see themselves and others in their full humanity, and possess the skills to do, be, and engage in an anti-oppression manner
5. Learning How to Learn
   1. Ability to be a self-directed learner
   2. Possessing reflective behaviors, with the ability to reflect on the purpose, process, limitations, and quality of one’s work