Course Description

Atlanta has been called “a city in a forest” for its urban canopy and surrounding woodlands, but is it a sustainable city? It is not, for instance, an “A-list city,” according to the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project). A recent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cites a new plastic plant, airport fuel spills, and algal blooms in the Chattahoochee among several environmental/climate threats Atlanta will soon face. Should Atlanta’s residents regard our city’s green reputation with pride, concern, or a mix of both? This course offers students the opportunity to work with grassroots environmental organizations throughout the metro-Atlanta area to gain firsthand experience and gather data on Atlanta’s ecological conditions. Through these efforts, we will begin to compare representations of Atlanta to the city known by its conservationists and wildlife defenders.

What is Service Learning?

The National Service-Learning Clearinghouse defines service learning as “…a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.” Service-learning seminars are essentially experiential courses that include a service component, with the opportunity to reflect on service activities and academic theory and research on service in general, service-learning specifically, and the type of service for which the course is designed. Students in service-learning courses spend a portion of the course engaged in actual service to an organization or individuals seeking services from that organization.

Course Objectives & Learning Outcomes

Honors Seminar courses emphasize the following skills:

• Developing proficient written and oral communication through attention to organization, presentation, and style; use of compelling and credible content, sources; and clear, cohesive, and compelling language and a well-supported, memorable central message
• Gaining interdisciplinary understanding by synthesizing ideas and experiences and learning to reach conclusions by combining examples from more than one field
• Developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills by cultivating the mental habit of stating problems and issues clearly; proper sourcing of information and questioning of expert opinions; analyzing personal assumptions; and reaching logical conclusions and solutions.
• Nurturing creativity by pursuing assignments or research in potentially risky, untested ways; integrating divergent or contradictory ideas; extending a novel question, format, or product to create new knowledge; and producing transformative ideas or solutions.
• Cultivating a global perspective through study abroad experiences; seeking insight into personal cultural values; interpreting intercultural experience from more than one viewpoint; and negotiating a shared understanding of differences with openness.

This course emphasizes the following additional civic literacies and career competencies:

• Students will identify environmentalist and conservation histories relevant to the US South, urban environments, and the city of Atlanta in particular.
• Students will demonstrate how these histories inform their engagement with community partners and environmental movements, whose work their volunteer efforts support.
• Students will compare their experiences in the course with their own prior conceptions, public perceptions, and media representations of Atlanta’s sustainability efforts and climate awareness/preparedness.
• Students will compose and support their own, original arguments about regional or citywide environmental needs and the urgency and scale of those needs.
• Students will produce public-facing projects in support of their arguments, highlighting local conservation efforts and needs and connecting their firsthand experiences to both longer histories of environmentalist movements throughout the nation and broader histories of global climate justice and readiness movements.