SOTL Project HUBI-ELSI Portfolio

HUBI-ELSI Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Project

Food for Thought

Impact on Undergraduate Teaching and Learning

The HUBI-ELSI Food for Thought project will promote teaching and learning that prepares students to work within uncertain intellectual boundaries and to connect existing knowledge to complex problems, to recognize the multitude of disciplines necessary to work towards solutions to these problems and to understand diversity and advocate for social justice and change. The project also addresses the need for new and integrative models for assessing student learning and for finding ways to make visible the connections between teaching and student learning, and aims to provide a model for learning communities consistent with an action agenda for the development of a teaching commons.

HUBI-ELSI SOTL Proposal
This is a link to the successful proposal put forth on March 1st, 2006 for the Scholarship of Teaching Leadership Grant.

The Focus of the Investigation
Two interdisciplinary initiatives on the IUB campus, Human Biology [HUBI] and the Environmental Literacy and Sustainability Initiative [ELSI], seek to advance knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries and to provide transformative learning experiences that nurture students in their cognitive, social, ethical, cultural and global identities. This project will develop and test a novel model of cross-disciplinary service learning as one approach to achieving our goals of fostering student interdisciplinary understanding, intellectual and personal development, and civic engagement. We will collect a variety of data on students and community partners and use faculty and program portfolios as a framework for evaluating this data in order to assess our questions about student learning and community outcomes and to allow faculty to reflect on and plan for improvements in individual courses and the service-learning program as a whole.

Environmental Literacy and Sustainability Initiative

Human Biology

Mother Hubbard's Cupboard

Hilltop Garden and Nature Center

SPROUTS

Fostering and Assessing the Work of the Learning Community
June 15th, 2006: The faculty and community partners meet to discuss the goals of the project and establish potential service-learning projects. During this meeting the group begins to address the question: What do we mean by "food literacy"? An affinity map is used to initiate this common understanding that will eventually assist faculty and community partners in focusing and connecting student learning goals for the semester.
June - July, 2006: Subcommittees meet to plan and prepare to do the work of implementing the service-learning courses and collecting the data this Fall Semester 2006.
August 14th (1-5 PM) and August 16th (1-4 PM), 2006: Student Portfolio and Faculty Course Portfolio Workshops for faculty.

Portfolio Workshops
The agenda for the Faculty Course Portfolio and Student E-Portfolio Workshops held in August 2006 are provided as a PDF file.

Student Portfolio Gallery Page
Issues in Dietetics HPER N401 A culminating class to address current issues in dietetics, including such topics as medical ethics, CAM, and reimbursement for services. Students will develop a career portfolio and ready themselves for the dietetic internship process.
Risk Communication SPEA E412/512 Risk communication is the means by which technical information is communicated to others (the public included), especially in the context of making decisions about environmentally related policy (such as siting of a landfill). The course emphasizes both theory (in lectures) and practical experience through developing and acting in role-play scenarios.
Graphic Design Studio FINA S452 Directed, advanced study in graphic design.
The City as Ecosystem COLL E105 Can cities and nature coexist? This course will provide a foundation in ecosystem ecology and explore its applications to the creation of sustainable communities. Topics include ecosystem services, global change, and sustainable use of resources.

FFT Student Electronic Portfolio Template
A template was developed to help students with the construction of their e-portfolios. This template was emailed to student KEEP accounts.

Faculty Course Portfolios
Vicky Getty, Director, Didactic Program in Dietetics, Applied Health Sciences, Issues in Dietetics
Diane Henshel, Associate Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Risk Communication
James Reidhaar, Associate Professor, School of Fine Arts,Graphic Design BFA Studio
Heather Reynolds, Assistant Professor, Biology,The City As Ecosystem

Faculty Course Portfolio Template
This template is being used by participating faculty to construct their course portfolios.

Our Research Approach
Pedagogical Model Being Investigated:
Our pedagogical model is a constellation of multiple service-learning courses across a range of disciplines, organized around a central theme and a common set of community partners, with a built-in support mechanism for cross-disciplinary sharing and collaboration - a learning community. We have chosen food and agriculture as a model interdisciplinary theme that cuts across critical social, economic and environmental issues at local to global scales, but we anticipate broad utility of our approach in advancing teaching and learning about other inherently multidisciplinary issues in the HUBI curriculum and beyond (e.g. environmental literacy, human health and disease). Our model operates very much within the framework of the Teaching Commons, where faculty, students and community come together to engage in experiential learning, dialogue and reflection, making visible both the work of teaching and learning and its power to transform student, faculty and community life.

Emerging Results

Helpful Resources and References