Rebecca Boger: Using Food Security in Introduction to Urban Sustainability at CUNY Brooklyn College
Rebecca Boger, Brooklyn College, CUNY
My course is an introduction to urban sustainability that integrates materials from environmental science, sociology and economics. As a relatively new course, I have been learning about what works or doesn't work each time I teach it. From the onset, the course was designed around two-week units pertaining to sustainability topics (e.g., water, transportation, housing). A few years ago, I took a Team Based Learning (TBL) workshop. While the course structure doesn't totally fit within the TBL design, I do apply many of the elements, such as having students work in teams throughout the semester, giving quizzes at the beginning of each unit so that students do the reading and come prepared to learn more deeply about a subject, and more application activities and fewer lectures. One of the course units is food and so the food security module was a perfect fit for the course, both in content and structure.