School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences
Student capstone and applied projects from ASU's School of Sustainability.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Curriculum
- All Subjects: Business
Description
In the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District (MPUSD), we ask our students to ‘dream big and dare greatly,’ but threats like climate change, population growth, and technological automation are threatening the realization of those dreams. Therefore, we must implement Sustainability NOW—an interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum that can help us address these threats while improving our local educational system. Sustainability NOW is an innovative, project-based, and STEM-centered curriculum that represents a strategic lever for the Educational Partnership Center (EPC) in achieving expanded outcomes that benefit the greater social good. But Sustainability NOW is more than a curriculum, it is a full-fledged organizational strategy. This report illustrates how a sustainability education program was designed and strategically mapped for MPUSD and the EPC.
ContributorsMutshnick, Christopher (Author)
Created2019-05-15
Description
Incorporating a Sustainability (S) focus curriculum through a sustainability lens, across all degree pathways in higher educational institutions using Indigenous Knowledge as a foundational learning platform can increase successful student learning outcomes. By realizing shared values of open communication, respect and diversity, and high expectation of knowledge explorations; Science, Sustainability, and Indigenous Knowledge systems can build upon curriculum that supports the college, students, our community, and global awareness of unsustainable practice. Higher education institutions have relied mainly on empirical evidence that supports reasoning and logic while Indigenous Knowledge systems uses experiential observations and learning. Being Indigenous Native Hawaiian and doing academic research from scholarly works of Native Hawaiians and their methodology in Science observations; I realized that a sustainability systems model share common value systems, but there is a disconnect between these two powerful systems. Building a coalition of experts in each field of study can create a new learning paradigm through curriculum as a holistic approach to systems thinking. All of the key components to creating a Sustainability focus curriculum are already in place at universities, and now is the time to bridge them together through collective shared values.
ContributorsKakalia, Gordean (Author)
Created2019-05-15
Description
In northern Arizona, the removal of woody biomass from forested land has garnered a high level of interest as threats of catastrophic wildfires have increased in recent years. Although there has been a great deal of vocal support for forest restoration, efforts on the ground are often stalled by complex federal contracting systems, a weak logging and sawmill industry, low-quality timber, and inabilities to guarantee long-term biomass supplies to processers. These barriers are exceedingly apparent in in the Flagstaff area, where the vast majority of forested land falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government and little infrastructure exists for wood product industries. In order to address these obstacles, forest stakeholders in Coconino County are actively searching for enterprises to utilize material that urgently needs to be removed from the surrounding forests. This project aimed to assist stakeholders in this endeavor by identifying and researching a number of practical and innovative woody biomass utilization enterprises that are suited to the existing regional infrastructure. While there are a variety of ways to process biomass, this project focuses on the following four end products because of their ability to use residual materials from harvest and sawmill operations, their low-tech nature, and the end product’s proximity to potential markets: biochar, compost, wood-plastic composites, and mushroom cultivation. Each of these products, and the processes used to create them, were analyzed and evaluated using a sustainable enterprise framework, and the final results were summarized in a portfolio for stakeholders in the region to review. Although this project offered just a glimpse of what is possible, the ultimate aim was to foster collaborative conversations regarding how forest restoration residues can be used in sustainable and innovative ways.
ContributorsPaulus, Caitlin (Contributor)
Created2019-05-15
Description
The purpose of this paper is to identify the absence of sustainability teachings within our private school systems, introduce a program for the school systems to incorporate into existing curriculum, and present the process that would be needed to be followed for introduction of this program. There is a growing interest in the topic of sustainability and how it potentially will affect the next generations. Today some large companies and even some countries around the world are engaging in sustainability practices. Currently this is a very small piece of action regarding what needs to take place to hope to promote change around the world. Layering sustainable teachings and practices into children in their formidable years through graduation from high-school will bring about individuals that incorporate sustainable living into their everyday personal and professional lives. Repeating this practice generation after generation will ensure a sustainable planet.
ContributorsJanner, Brian D. (Author)
Created2018-04-24
Description
COVID-19 brought so much uncertainty into the world and has molded this project into what it is today. The first project journey that was chosen was meant to show the impact of how much plastic waste was being produced at Starbucks. Then due to COVID-19 yet again, it changed into how much paper waste there was within the State of Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) Business and Professions Division (BPD). DOL BPD is a state agency division that licenses over forty plus professional and business licenses to the residents of Washington state. Due to the pandemic, the project transformed into how the three pillars of sustainability impacts remote work within BPD. BPD is in this new and unique paradigm where the deliverable that was brought forth as this project completed are, “The 9 Benefits of Sustainability through Remote Work” (Appendix D) where this specifically showed DOL why remote work is sustainable and how it should be implemented even further throughout the agency. This list was put together with the benefits that best fit DOL BPD.
ContributorsReynolds, Jordan (Writer of accompanying material)
Created2021-02-11