Organizing meeting: Friday, April 24, 12:00-1:00pm
Gordon Commons, room A-1
Lunch provided! Please join us!
Friends,
We invite interested faculty and graduate students to join us for a discussion of the possible development of the GreenHouse, a residential learning community with sustainability as its constitutive theme.
Residential learning communities are residence halls organized around the provision of diverse, integrated, curricular and extracurricular educational opportunities for the students who live there. Six learning communities have been developed at UW-Madison to serve students interested in such areas as entrepreneurship, women in science and engineering, languages, liberal education, and multiculturalism (see http://www.learning.wisc.edu/communities/res.html).
We believe that creation of a residential learning community focused on sustainability would be a timely and pedagogically productive addition to campus life and learning. What we are provisionally calling the GreenHouse would offer undergraduate students the opportunity both to contemplate the meanings of sustainability and to actually enact sustainable practices with the guidance and active participation of faculty, fellow students, staff, and citizen mentors.
UW-Madison is uniquely well positioned to support such an undertaking. Many faculty and graduate students are deeply involved in research and teaching on sustainability. Many university programs are committed to finding practical applications of sustainability. And there are in and around Dane County many advocacy groups working for a healthy environment and social justice. These resources can be mobilized in the service of educating students from all majors and fields of study. Especially, the GreenHouse could be a vehicle for the recruitment and retention of students from ethnically and socially diverse backgrounds.
See the attached Proposed Framework for a GreenHouse Residential Learning Community at UW for our initial vision of how this project might unfold.
Wouldnt you like to be involved in this enterprise? Wont you join us to talk about how we might envision the GreenHouse and how we might move it forward? Wont you consider giving this project support , advice and energy?
Please meet with us on Friday, April 24, 12:00-1:00pm, in Gordon Commons, room 1-A to discuss this exciting possibility. If you would like a free lunch, courtesy of L&S Academic Services, please RSVP by Wednesday, April 22 to Cal.Bergman@housing.wisc.edu. Gordon Commons is located between University Square and the SERF. To get to room 1-A, enter Gordon Commons on the West side of the building that faces Sellery Hall. We will have a greeter in the lobby to show you the way! Contact us if you have any questions, or cannot make the meeting but would like to be involved. We hope to see you!
Jack Kloppenburg, Department of Rural Sociology, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
Cal Bergman, Department of Residence Life
Grace Latz, undergraduate International Studies-Global Commons major
Ashley Lee, undergraduate Rural Sociology major
