Learning Sustainability through Community Collaborations
Community-engaged learning aims to provide a transformational experience for the instructor, student, and community partners, while leaving a positive impact on the community, its people, and the built environment. Our students play the role of the initiator rather than imitator, and they are responsible for taking control of their own learning and those of their peers.
Sustainable Cities fulfills the capstone community-engaged learning requirement for Urban Studies majors. Our students who successfully complete all course requirements will:
Furthermore, our students meet the following community-engaged learning objectives:
Sustainable Cities fulfills the capstone community-engaged learning requirement for Urban Studies majors. Our students who successfully complete all course requirements will:
- Describe basic concepts of sustainability, land use, transportation planning, air quality, and public health as it relates to spatial outcomes in urban communities;
- Analyze impacts of historical and current policies of sustainability in the Bay Area;
- Articulate challenges that low income and communities of color face in achieving sustainability goals and ways in which those obstacles could be mitigated;
- Learn how planners can contribute to achieving sustainability goals by engaging in a service-learning project and working collaboratively with a community partner; and
- Strengthen technical skills to propose sustainability recommendations through collecting, describing, and critically analyzing qualitative and quantitative data.
Furthermore, our students meet the following community-engaged learning objectives:
- Engage in a respectful, collaborative relationship with a local community partner;
- Place service-learning experience within broader context of sustainability issues;
- Learn differences in backgrounds, worldviews, and social contexts in a community;
- Deliver a final deliverable to the community partner that demonstrates accumulated knowledge between classroom and service-learning site;
- Practice “soft” skills that will be useful for understanding social difference, including cultural awareness, ability to listen, and relationships with community stakeholders;
- Strengthen a personal sense of civic responsibility; and
- Develop critical self-reflection on individual and group agency to diverse communities in the Bay Area as it relates to class, race, gender, and Stanford University affiliation.