By Tim Mitchell, Features Editor
As you walk into Dalhousie’s new College of Sustainability office on the fourth floor of the Goldberg Computer Science building, you will notice it’s being renovated. This is true of the program itself. It’s a work in progress.
“I think that (students) are finding it challenging, and I think we’re finding it challenging to teach,” says Steven Mannell, director of the college.
The college – which offers students a chance to graduate with a degree in Environment, Sustainability and Society (ESS) combined with another degree – is the first of its kind in Canada.
The first classes for the program began in September – the result of 18 months of planning. The college was expecting 150 students to enrol, but instead ended with 300.
The program is now two-thirds into the term and classes are packed. Some students have to sit on the floor to fit into the Potter Auditorium where the bi-weekly lectures are held.
“The first challenge that really hit hard in September was having twice as many students as we were expecting, and just dealing with the numbers and logistics,” says Mannell. “The intent of the college is to provide an interdisciplinary forum in Dalhousie that gives a place for people to work on issues of environment and sustainability and to do that from as broad a range of disciplinary perspectives as possible.”
The disciplines encompassed by the program range anywhere from political science to microbiology.
“I like the interdisciplinary approach,” says Timothy Rock, a first-year sustainability and planning student. “I think it’s good how they’re pulling different concepts. They’re doing a case study of many different topics and trying to prove a broad range of concepts through that. I think they could improve the length at which they’re staying on each topic. I’d like to see more brevity, but I like the case study approach, I like the lab approach.”
Mannell says the interdisciplinary nature of the class is necessary for understanding sustainability issues.
“You need to have enough of a sense of different disciplines we’re talking about to know that there’s some real substance there, and that substance is meaningful, but it’s also then to quickly drawback and say ‘OK, here’s how we can relate this to this,’” says Mannell. “This is how thinking about how the biology of a cow’s stomach might relate to a question of organic milk, which might relate to a question of policy around milk distribution in Nova Scotia, and that’s one example of things we’ve talked about – linking the very specific issues on the ground to more general issues about people’s perception and how they make choices.”
With no model to base the new program on, creating the sustainability college from scratch was not an easy thing to do.
“The second challenge was really trying to implement a very different model of teaching from what’s familiar,” says Mannell. “So the amount of time that goes into that, the amount of discussion amongst faculty and between faculty members and TAs to get the right quality of experience, and also to get the right level of trust, because what we’re doing is not fundamentally about content, it’s about method and pedagogical idea and delivery.”
There may not be many job opportunities for students graduating from the program specifically related to environment and sustainability, but Deborah Buszard, associate director of the college says there are advantages to graduating with a degree in ESS.
“They’ll be graduating with their double majors. What’s the advantage to someone graduating with this program? Whatever sort of career direction you may be thinking of going into, you will have the benefit of understanding environmental and sustainability issues, but that’s on the disciplinary side. On the other side, many, many organizations from the federal government on down through major corporations, provincial government, institutions (such as) schools, school boards, universities, hospitals are having sustainability offices, sustainability co-ordinators. Dalhousie has an office of sustainability and a director and several employees working on sustainability, and these jobs are the new kind of jobs opening up, and graduates from the program will be highly qualified to go off to those kinds of things.”
“I would like students who graduate from our program to believe that they’re agents of change,” says Mannell. “The amount of energy that students have brought to the course is really fantastic. It’s a really energetic place to go.”
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