Since my last update a lot of progress has been made in Teter Quad and with my personal project. My intent with the personal project was to interface with residents in regards to sustainability to find out what they already knew and to challenge them to go deeper in their understanding and practices.
What started out as an idea to run a series of practical skills workshops quickly fizzled as I realized the magnitude of coordinating the series and a general lack of interest. In just the informal discussions I had with residents, it didn't seem like they had any interest in learning more about bicycle repair, sewing, etc. which was pretty shocking for me. At a previous institution, I had participated in events like those I had proposed to generally enthusiastic student response. Not so much here. However, what did seem to resonate was programming that slyly integrated sustainability as an educational component of the event. Which is what I had proposed in my last blog. This included plans to show an outdoor movie while encouraging students to turn their lights off in order to see the movie. We also planned to plug the IU Energy Challenge at this event and provide food from a local vendor that sourced fresh, local ingredients in their products. Well, I am happy to report that we held the movie event at the end of October to enthusiastic response. We had approximately 60 students come out to watch Wall-E, a movie with environmental stewardship undertones that was also accessible to the general student population. The Director for Environmental Affairs and I led a discussion regarding the IU Energy Challenge and sustainable practices residents of Teter Quad could implement or may be already doing. We also administered an exit survey of students at the event to determine their knowledge level of sustainability as a result of the program. We had 11 responses to the survey, with overwhelmingly positive response that students had learned new skills they could implement in their lives to save resources. They also agreed that they were more likely to use those skills and that they would like to see more sustainability programming in the residence halls.
This program was extremely encouraging and motivated me to host another sustainability event before the end of the IU Energy Challenge, to feed off of the energy of the first program and give one last push in the hopes that Teter could pull ahead and win the challenge. So two Fridays ago, in conjunction with a small group of RA's, I hosted an ugly sweater party/competition to increase the visibility of the Energy Challenge and encourage students to layer up to stay warm instead of cranking the heat in their rooms. As laid out in my previous posting, our group hung eye-catching posters advertising the competition and provided prizes to the top two winners. The event had about 20 participants, all of whom took the same survey as the outdoor movie participants to gauge student knowledge and behavior around sustainability. This time around, because the connection to the IU Energy Challenge wasn't as strong as the movie, it was hard to articulate how turning off your lights and taking 10 minute showers related to wearing sweaters in the colder months. I believe the general idea was lost on a lot of the participants as I only had two students from the survey say they actually learned new skills around sustainability and that they would implement those skills in their daily lives. Teter ended up in fourth place out of five buildings in our residential neighborhood for the Energy Challenge, which made me realize just how hard it can be sometimes to get people to care about something they are unfamiliar with. Or just plain don't care about.
Moving forward, I am preparing a sustainability training/workshop with two RA's from other residential buildings to present at the Residential Life winter training in January. We hope to explain sustainability through the four pillars of the Residential Life Experience: 1. Academic Initiatives, 2. Personal Development, 3. Exploring Beliefs, and 4. Community Development. We are taking this approach in the hopes of connecting the explicit values of the department with our sustainability value. Additionally, we want to create a sustainability reference guide for RA's to utilize when looking for programming ideas. That way they have something quick and easy (speaking to the values of busy undergraduate college students) to do with their floors that revolves around sustainability.
I am contemplating how I would like to round out this experience for the end of the semester. If anyone has ideas for taking this project to the next level, let me know! I'm open to feedback and would love to look at this project from a different angle.
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