Campus Sustainability Learning Circles

Students, faculty, and staff are coming together over lunch on five Fridays in February, March, and April to talk about how we each make personal decisions. Decisions about what coffee to drink, food to eat, clothing to wear, cleaning products to use, paper to purchase, and transportation to ride are discussed. Faculty from philosophy, communications, community planning, and writing are helping to provide a framework for discussion. Funding from the Campus Compact supports a library on sustainable living. Through this process we will be building a stronger sense of community and of place as we consider how our everyday decisions affect ourselves and others, in our own neighborhoods and around the world.

Download the 2003 Series Schedule in PDF format. Information on next year's Learning Circles will be posted as soon as it is available.

The goal of the Sustainability Learning Circles is to:

• Encourage personal reflection about sustainability among diverse members of the URI community--students, staff, and faculty.
  
• Present the complexity of global sustainability issues and show that reasonable individuals may take a variety of actions based on strong regard for others and the environment (the ability to make explicit different rationales for behaviors and to develop respect for a variety of perspectives).
  
•  Encourage members of the community to develop awareness about values and actions and to frame their personal values in relation to global environmental, economic, and social realities.
  
• Help individuals, through informed discussion, to make connections between their values, their daily actions, and the consequences of these actions.
  
• Encourage practices based on articulated values which take into account the environment, economic, and social issues.
  
• Build strong community among staff, faculty, and students of different ages, socioeconomic groups, ethnicity, and backgrounds.
  
• Help develop affinity for this place and to help participants "become native."

 

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