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The invitation to students in the Sustainable Community
Development (SCD) Program is to study, design, apply and evaluate principles
of their particular interest toward a quality of life that secures
the created human community in cooperation with local ecosystems and
native life forms.
The undergraduate SCD Program at Prescott College, born in 1996, is one of the oldest programs of its kind from an accredited college.
It evolved from students in the Adult Degree Program (ADP) expressing
a need for a program
of study to explore ways to offer integrative service to human and natural
communities. That need for truly interdisciplinary lifework metamorphosed
into the SCD’s
Butterfly Curriculum whose four wings symbolize core categories of learning.
Students bring to the program their passionate focus in sustainability and
use the curriculum as a supportive frame for creation, with the collaboration
of
faculty, of their complete B.A. degree program of study.
The following is an elaboration on the Sustainable Community
Development (SCD) curriculum framework. Courses may be created from
these categories
and the student’s own design. The SCD framework is necessarily interdisciplinary,
inviting study in natural and social sciences, communications, and the
humanities,
which roughly corresponds to the contemporary Liberal Arts curriculum.
Students often find that their life vision naturally feels more at home
in one (or more) of the realms
and are encouraged to make that vision the center of their program curriculum,
seeking balance through studies and projects in other realms. The Four
Realms include:
This first realm of the Sustainable Community is the
Natural History of the Region. Students are invited to identify
qualities of right relationship with the natural world of which they
are properly a part. They will learn to read the land, to intimately
know its resident life forms and vital forces so that they might know
its needs and limits. Students will, as Wendell Berry says, honestly
understand what the land is able to give with no harm to itself.
Students may find value in consideration of the ethos of Aldo Leopold,
who said, “We ought to file (an) environmental impact study before
we undertake anything that exploits or alters or endangers the splendid,
spacious, varied, magnificent, and terribly fragile earth that supports
us.” Having the technical knowledge to “file” such
an impact statement, literally or figuratively, will be an excellent
way for a student to gauge genuine understanding of this realm. Students
are invited to become conversant with the relationships among indigenous
plants and animals who surround and infuse their physical community.
Dynamics of energy flows, nutrient cycles, watersheds, climate, soils,
and limiting factors, for example, may be studied. Historical records
of natural and human presence (inclusive of native peoples and newcomers)
in this place are other paths of exploration.
Students are encouraged to spend ample time in the company of the
living systems of the community and environs, documenting what they
learn in the nomenclature of both science and art. Field journals may
be elaborate, colorful, and evocative. They may take the form of poetry,
story, song, or dance, as well as more traditional narrative accounts.
Cumulative findings presented as compassionate scholarship will be
revered by community residents as a family album. Such fruits of responsible
inquiry by students and their fellow citizen-scientists will be useful
for decision-makers and citizens alike when proposals are brought before
the community for future projects of any kind or scale.
As a student develops a deeper understanding of how
members of his or her community are sustained, it is possible to begin
to ask how these needs might be filled in more sustainable ways. To
live and thrive and endure in the world requires a tapestry of knowledge,
skills, and values. We must eat, shelter ourselves from inhospitable
elements, move ourselves and our wares around, segregate and then recycle
our wastes, ensure our safety, and see to our continued learning--and
all in the spirit of harmony with other living beings with whom we
share our place on the earth.
We therefore call the Second Realm of the Sustainable Community Appropriate
Technologies and their Assessment (ATA). The work in ATA includes studies
in, for instance, permaculture design and practice; low-energy use
shelters that rise not in defiance of the land but in harmony with
it; siting of housing and work spaces to better respond to human needs
for light, quietude, exercise, social interaction, and play. Additional
studies may investigate strengths and challenges of planning and zoning
processes, including alternative, multiple, or restored uses of public
buildings and other physical resources. Students will attempt to discover
ways for people in the community livelihood sphere to better serve
themselves and their obligations, such as through flex-time, job-sharing,
adult and childcare at work sites, neighborhood cooperatives, work
at home, and other innovations.
An awareness of ecological and associative economics is essential
to help communities create options alternative to a mind set that appreciates
only mechanisms of “progress and growth” such as extraction
of resources for direct conversion to capital, or conversion of agricultural
land to suburban development. Students will help to identify ways for
communities also to discover value in ecosystems for their “invisible” benefits.
Forests, for example, would be prized for their oxygen generating capacity,
for their biotic diversity, and for their capacity to engender in humans
an aesthetic effect that promotes mental health.
Familiarity with economics also is intimately connected to measuring
the size/ impact of the ecological footprint of human enterprise. Students
are invited to learn how to create a “personal sustainability
account” based on their own homes, and to conduct neighborhood
energy and resource “audits” to concretely know what is
required for maintenance of individual and community life. In the case
of a community, this includes the physical and human infrastructure
required to deliver those goods and services to their community. The
calibration of the community “footprint” is a precursor
to planning. Students may combine objectives of the overall energy
audit with courses devoted to urban and rural planning. Study and application
of earth-appropriate assessment principles will help students to be
creative in their designs of human enterprises and to be compassionate
in their critiques of planning processes. Such findings will be shared
with neighbors and decision-makers in the student’s community.
The third realm invites students to explore their
individual psyches to better know the enduring legacy of their mammal
nature. From the habitat of the heart the move is outward to embrace
genuine understanding of others in the neighborhood, to explore the
complexities of human social groups and their interior topography of
personal world view, emotion, expectation, and shifting allegiances.
This third realm is an invitation to understanding of the Social,
Spiritual, and Philosophical Foundations of Community. Here
students will investigate the multi-layered hive of human agency and
invisible infrastructure.
Students may explore the history of communities, influences on community
of economics, religion, and politics, and how values grow and are shaped
under these influences. The relationship between humans and all other
beings, and the genetic and cultural dynamics within each of us, are
significant threads of this interdisciplinary study. Students may want
to investigate the emerging body of insights that has come to be called
Sociobiology and Ecopsychology and other psycho-spiritual paths.
Students are invited to look up from their gardens and bicycle paths
to remember that even as they are locally determined in terms of their
plans and actions, they are inextricably linked to forces beyond the
visible horizon. This is a reminder of their membership in communities
invisible and far-reaching such as the law, mores, the evolution and
maintenance of public policy. Students are encouraged to explore and
identify ways they and their community belong to county, state, national,
and global entities. This will be one expression of understanding of
how local actions may breed distant effects, and vice-versa.
There is inherent in the many challenges of community
creation a high likelihood of false steps, blind alleys, communal choir
rehearsals in which some are tone deaf while others simply can’t
sing on key. Students may encounter individuals who operate from a
palette of ethos so diverse as to be bewildering. There will be those
who work hard, and others who hardly work. Decisions will be made in
harmony one day and will be maddeningly elusive the next. Philosophies
will mesh and collide, religious roots, political perspectives, preferences
for beef or tofu will wrap participants in laughter or cloak them in
pain. Through it all, however, students will remind themselves of the
beauty and significance of this work.
The fourth realm is an invitation to Communication, Education,
and Celebration in the Community. To help facilitate authentic communication
in the community, the student is invited to learn consensus process,
group problem-enrichment/ solving, and collaborative action and assessment.
To celebrate accomplishments in the community, students will create
models for recognizing achievements subtle and large, and will help
the community to respect and restore rites of passage among themselves
and in local nature.
The student, by her knowledge of natural seasons and cycles, and of
the psychological “weather” and social culture(s) of her
community, will be prepared to give to her community a rich and beautiful
idea of itself. This portrait of the community is also a gift to the
future, a legacy for the children who follow. It is the passing on
of identify and a sense of belonging—an education of the head
and the heart. Students will help to create, present, and preserve
the community’s emerging sense of its more sustainable self in
a diversity of forms. These may include written histories, artworks,
plays, musicals, meditation gardens, or living archives of floral and
faunal communities within a greenbelt zone. There will be tales many
times told, for as Barry Lopez says, “Everything is held together
with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and
compassion.” In such ways a community is given memory. Members
are given ongoing opportunities to communicate their affections for
one another, to create lattices for mutual support and compassionate
elaboration of respectful differences in the conduct of daily tasks
and long-term plans.
There will be festivals to mark the seasons of the land and its creatures,
and to offer gratitude to them as members of the larger family of beings.
It is hoped that in the creation of community, students will discover
ways to lighten their marks upon the earth and to more deeply impress
this legacy on the humans who follow them. This is where education
becomes a core value.
In so doing, members of the community may come to know that true sustenance
invites sacrifice and reward. That, as Jim Corbett says, “The
problem is not that modern man wants so much but that he aspires to
so little.” There is wonderful irony here, in that the act of
covenanting oneself to the well being of all living members of the
community imbues one with intimations of immortality. One truly feels
that in letting go, one forever remains. Students may come to the truth
as expressed by Annie Dillard: “I think that the dying pray at
the last not ‘please,’ but ‘thank you,’ as
a guest thanks his host at the door.”
Here, at the beginning of the journey to community, students are invited
to cross the threshold of their personal vision to deepen their learning
and preparation for leadership in a more humane and sustainable world.
For purposes of building an academic curriculum, this
framework speaks of the four realms as independent of one another. Students
will find, however, that there is necessary overlap among the realms.
The health of the natural environment studied in Realm One will inform
the way a community plans to address its physical infrastructure (Realm
Two) in terms of design and material for shelters. Similarly, cold-weather
communities that require protected transport will require different approaches
to problem-solving than communities in more temperate zones.
Another way to integrate objectives and activities is to think of a
particular theme or thread (for example, aged community members) that
can be addressed in each course across all four realms. How will we help
our elderly community members to have access to nearby wilderness areas?
How will design of housing clusters be influenced by our concern for
limited mobility and strength of elders? In our schools or other educational
settings, how will we invite the elderly to be mentors for younger students?
And in our celebrations of seasons and other community efforts, how will
we address diverse expectations of the young and the old?
Students may be served by creating a master list of ideas and projects
that focus on making communities more sustainable. These may then be
assigned as objectives and or activities in specific courses. Another
way to say this is that the ultimate courses will be distilled from the
body of intriguing ideas and projects a student brings to this academic
program through her original life vision.
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