Green building renovations as a teaching tool: Case studies in applied environmental science and ecology pedagogy

Background/Question/Methods

Green building renovations present an opportunity not only to embrace sustainability by mimicking ecological processes in building redesign, but also to communicate ecological concepts to the building’s inhabitants and visitors. Allegheny College, a small liberal arts school, recently undertook a green renovation project that will house the Environmental Science (ES) department.  Although previous research suggests that green buildings can serve a valuable role as an ecology and sustainability teaching tool, researchers have not yet examined the teaching and learning potential throughout the green building renovation process. The ES faculty members at Allegheny believed that by actively engaging students in the renovation project, we would teach them valuable communication, research and project management skills while also delivering environmental science and ecology content in a novel way. Consequently, six courses have included major projects related to the green building renovation (including native plant landscaping, sustainable garden design, aquaponics design and science communication), and several students have completed senior theses on this topic. To better understand the challenges and benefits of this approach, the authors conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with current and former ES students who participated in the green renovation process and 10 faculty and staff members connected to these efforts.

Results/Conclusions

Our analysis of interviews with faculty, staff and students revealed three key conclusions. First, because they were working on an applied project at their institution, students feel a tremendous sense of ownership and responsibility for the outcomes of the project. Consequently, their understanding of key ecological and environmental science concepts, especially surrounding ideas of systems thinking (aquaponics project) and ecological restoration (native plant landscaping project) improved considerably through participation in the renovations. Second, both faculty members and students acknowledge the inevitable messiness of these projects and the challenges of doing an applied project within the classroom setting, though both groups also agree that this provided students with the space to develop intangible professional skills (e.g. communication, database management) to complement their scientific knowledge acquisition. Finally, although the renovation project is now complete, the ES community plans to continue using these new student-designed spaces as teaching tools. For example, we are designing several agro-ecology labs – focused on soil science, beneficial insects and seed saving/plant genetics – that will take advantage of the student-designed sustainable garden adjacent to the building.