Connecting, Including, and Preparing: The SRS Approach

"With new programs you have the opportunity to enact new approaches and standards," says Research Associate Professor Charles "Chuck" Henry, explaining just one reason he is enthusiastic about the proposed Sustainable Resource Sciences major offered jointly by the College of Forest Resources and the Program on the Environment.

"From the very beginning, we have been designing instructional technologies into this program to connect it with current research and field work, to make it more available to the professionals we want to reach, and to better prepare the students to compete in the job market," says Henry. "Already, we have developed methods that seem to us like a quantum leap in how we do teaching and learning. We are really excited about the possibilities."

Creating the Sustainable Resourse Sciences Major

The Sustainable Resource Sciences' Web site helps open the major to working professionals and provides resources for all students in the program.

Sustainable Resource Sciences (SRS), currently a track within the Conservation of Wildland Resources major, has been proposed as a Bachelor of Science major in the College of Forest Resources/Program on the Environment. The vision for the SRS program is to study the ways in which our society can actively participate in the sustainability of our environment.

Faculty who teach the SRS core courses are drawn not only from all divisions of the College of Forest Resources, but also from other UW colleges and departments. Besides covering the basic natural sciences, students study recycling and product life cycle analysis, bioremediation, soils and soils amendments, restoration ecology, and human and marketing dimensions.

Creating a program in this field presents challenges. Because this is very much an applied science, lectures can't just be theory and history, according to Henry.

"Each project has unique aspects and uses techniques that are constantly changing," he explains. "So students need to see current research and projects--stuff that hasn't even made it into the textbooks yet."

SRS got a boost last fall when Henry received $130,000 in UW Tools for Transformation funding, both to develop the proposed program further and to set up a demonstration compost facility for organic waste materials generated on campus. The facility, to be located near the Center for Urban Horticulture in the Montlake area, will be an integral part of the SRS program, providing educational, research, and technology transfer opportunities.

Connecting to Ongoing Work

To reduce erosion, Professor Chuck Henry places hay bales along the shoreline of a marsh at the Bunker Hill, Idaho Superfund site. By spreading thick layers of compost on the marsh, lead contamination in the soil was isolated and healthy vegetation grown to provide food for wildlife.

A basic objective Henry sees for the SRS program is to closely connect class activities with ongoing research and work in the field. Last fall he worked on a bioremediation project in Idaho. After teaching Monday through Wednesday, he would fly to Idaho and spend Thursday and Friday at the project site. When he got back to his motel each night, he would post pictures and a report of the day's work on the project's Web site (weber.u.washington.edu/~clh/bunker.html).

"The next week I would bring up the pages in class and say, 'This is the kind of work this program will prepare you for'," recalls Henry. "The students were inspired. Many of them didn't know that projects like ours were being done."

These project Web sites are becoming the way to go, says Henry, especially as a means of filing quarterly reports to funding agencies. In the past, the report would go to an agency manager, who might skim the abstract and conclusions and then file it away. With a Web site, all the people involved and anyone else who is interested can follow the work as it is happening.

King County, for example, is a participant in the Idaho project. County Executive Ron Sims was so impressed with the project's Web site, reports Henry, that he put a link to it on the King County home page.

"Scientists cannot be off in a corner working by themselves anymore," says Henry. "Given the technology we have today, if you're not working together with everybody, you're not working. I now have my graduate students submit their reports as Web sites."

Going Online Opens Major to Professionals

As part of the ESC418 Science of Composting class, students used a trough composter near Bloedel Hall to reduce food wastes, yard trimmings, manure, and other biosolids to compost.

Another objective of the SRS program is to design classes so that students--many of whom are working professionals--can get all the lectures, submit their assignments, get grades, and do much of their communication with other students over the Internet by using Web pages and email. Building strong person-to-person interaction will be reinforced through field trips, group projects, and class meetings.

"If we can bring both these pieces--online communications and in-person projects--together, tremendous things can happen," says Henry. "UWired has been great in giving us ideas on how to make progress toward this two-part objective."

As a first step in this direction, Henry is putting everything that would be projected on-screen during a lecture onto a class Web site. He does all his presentations with Microsoft PowerPoint and says he "simply saves them as HTML files and downloads them to our server before each class."

With a class Web site, students who attend the lectures enjoy the advantages of:

• Connecting to the Web site and reviewing the material before the lecture
• Printing the material so they have it during class

Students who cannot attend a lecture because of family or job commitments can benefit from the class Web site by:

• Keeping up with the class from home
• Being well prepared to participate in the on-campus and field trip parts of the course

On a site contaminated with heavy metals from mining operations, Professor Henry used logyard waste and wood ash treatments to reestablish vegetation. Treated areas showed lush growth, while untreated ground remained barren.

"Students may sacrifice something by not being in class for every lecture," says Henry, "but this approach means they can take the class, whereas otherwise they could not."

The diversity of people interested in the SRS program also presents challenges in how to design the courses.

"Many of our students are skilled professionals, but their skills may be out-of-date, they may have limited science or math background, or they may not have experience in systematic problem definition and solving," says Henry.

To address this problem, a new class--Tools for the Environmental Scientist: Problem Solving--was created. Henry conducts the class so students can recognize what skills they need to develop to be successful in the SRS program. When the class cannot address a particular student's needs, Henry refers him or her to resources elsewhere such as on the Web or other training programs on campus.

"The more I do, the more I realize how much I have to learn about these technologies, and the more I say 'Wow!'" admits Henry. "Teaching ten years from now is going to be phenomenally different. We will have so many neat tools to use. They will add a huge amount of flexibility to what students and teachers can do."