Using the Zero-Waste Circular Economy Module in Falcon Discovery Seminar
Noah Giansiracusa, Bentley UniversityCourse Description
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About the Course
Falcon Discovery Seminar (FDS100)
Level: 1st-year seminar to welcome students to college
Size: 20 students
Format: In-person
The Falcon Discovery Seminar engages first year students in the university community and prepares them to be lifelong learners. A Bentley education is a transformative experience. Students must learn to navigate a variety of communities throughout their time here. After they graduate, they will join new communities and continue to do so throughout their lives. Communities take many forms and every community experiences problems. The problems are often complex and solutions are rarely straightforward. Problems can be multi-faceted, ambiguous, and contentious. The perception of a problem and its solutions can be fundamentally different based on perspectives and experiences. Communities can be a formidable force in working to solve problems; communities can also play a role in exacerbating problems. This course introduces students to the power of communities by framing the discussion of communities around an authentic problem of the faculty member's choosing.
Explore the Zero-Waste Circular Economy Module Module [rightarrow
Relationship of the Zero-Waste Circular Economy Module to Your Course
Every student at Bentley has to take one section of this 1st-year seminar FDS, but each instructor chooses the academic topic to be covered. Mine here focused on how math can be used in a range of settings, but also the limitations and shortcomings of an over-reliance on math. We didn't discuss sustainability as a topic before the module, but the module gave us an opportunity to try to think of sustainability in mathematical terms--especially the idea of a circular economy has a very nice mathy feel (the difference between circular and linear is, I'd say, a mathy difference!). Also, when the students dug into their exercises, they paid attention to the numbers on the life cycle of products and how the estimates work and where they came from. I worked the module in roughly at the middle of the semester, we only spent one class on it but that was 80mins, and at the end of the semester each student had to write a paper on a topic of their choosing where math plays a role in some real-world issue and I suggested sustainability/circular economy as one possible choice for that.
Integrating the Module into Your Course
Our course was really looking at how math can be used in lots of different parts of our lives and in society. So we just wove this in as one of the topics. We had early looked at social media where math comes into play. We looked at college rankings, and this seemed a natural one. But what we were trying to do is really look at math, not in terms of equations and numbers and formulas, but more just a conceptual layout. So I really liked the circular economy because, in my view, it is a mathematical perspective that you think of production and everything as an input and an output, like a function. And it's this idea that we want that function to continue and wrap around rather than just product starts and it dies. So we just spent a day talking about this before the module, and then we went and had the students do their in-class activity where they looked up these life cycles, and it just fit in nicely. There wasn't much math, but it still was a nice interplay there.
What Worked Well
What worked well was really having the students do their own research. I split them into groups and had each group choose a product. One was doing drinks, one was doing smartphones. I forget the third one, clothing, like t-shirts. And I think what really worked well was these are products that are so familiar. They all have these, they've all bought these, and none of us, myself included, have ever really stopped to think about the basics, that pipeline of where did they start, what were the steps, how did it get to us? And looking at some, we tried to really push because of the math context, what are the numbers? How much resources does it take? What's the efficiency? How much is wasted? Where do these things go? How much gets used? What is it sold for? What are the markups along these stages? So I think rather than just me telling them like, oh, there's a lot of waste, or that we could do things better, having them think about products that they've used, they've bought, but they've never thought about, and really just doing Google search type of research, like, oh, these are the numbers and this is what happens. I think they took a lot of ownership in that activity and that was really helpful.
Challenges and How They Were Addressed
I think the challenges, we came away with a good understanding of how the system is, and it was a little bit disappointing in terms of how do we make it better. Now we appreciate how dangerous a linear economy is, all the inefficiencies and waste. And it would be great to make it more circular, but what could we in the classroom do? And I think that was a challenge because it's hard to hear the problems and not hear much about the solutions. And probably others who are more versed in the subject would know more about that step, but since it's not my area, I couldn't help them too much. So I felt a little bit like, I don't know, let's try to waste less and recycle more and reuse.
Student Response to the Module and Activities
Yeah, I think for sure doing the research to try to figure out what is the lifecycle of a product look like, what are the numbers involved? I think they definitely got the idea that there's a lot of stories behind the products that we purchase and use, and that it's mostly hidden from view, unless you take a step to look into it, and that a lot of this information is readily out there. It's not that it's hard to find, it's that we never thought to look for it in the first place. I think that resonated with them, that you can open your eyes and understand where things come from and what's involved in the production process.