Unfortunately not all other cities that are of a similar size and social composition of Easton are fortunate enough to have an organization such as NNC that prioritizes climate education and community engagement. Therefore the possibility of repeating this project in other cities is largely dependent on the pre-existing structures at play within a city, the same can be said of the presence of an institution with a lot of people willing to volunteer to help run events, such as Lafayette College. That also puts us at an advantageous position because acting as a bridge for the two institutions makes a lot more sense than trying to start from scratch elsewhere. One other thing that was interesting in learning about Lafayette’s role in NNC events, is that Lehigh University is already a big player in their Climate Summit which is a bigger event which targets a similar issue. Beyond just the rivalry attitude, it’s a shame that Lafayette isn’t more involved in these events, but starting to mobilize on-campus communities with the hope of getting them involved with the climate symposium is a great stepping stone for more collaboration in the future. 

There is a ton of room to expand on this prompt, especially as we’re the first group to tackle this particular problem in the history of this capstone. Not only can the framework itself be changed, expanded and improved, but continuing to figure out ways to diversify the audience and finding ways to institutionalize Lafayette’s participation annually would all be great ways to continue this effort. Something that we learned pretty late is what a big undertaking instituting a LANDIS center project would be for three senior students, and creating something where Lafayette students volunteer to present different climate change topics and ideas regularly in Easton Area Public Schools would be an interesting route for the future. For now however, our sincerest hope is that the framework is able to put the NNC into contact with prominent, environmentally focused organizations on and off campus!

 

EGRS Outcomes 

Throughout the process of grounding ourselves with readings and familiarizing ourselves with sociotechnical thinking at the introduction of this course, it seemed nonsensical to approach problems with a solution first attitude. We saw this type of thinking in a number of case studies all around the world involving foreign engineers; where using very minimal, often external sources, and research engineers justify producing prototypes and other products for communities without even knowing them. Engineering Studies students are taught community centered design tactics, which urges them to consider factors, such as the community’s history, current standing, marginalized groups within the community, environmental factors, religious beliefs, and existing hierarchies, before considering how they as students and engineers fit into the solution. Oftentimes, groups entering the community would find (too late) that their “help” wasn’t needed/wanted, or their efforts were targeted at something that the community didn’t value as a problem at all, rather something they assumed would be based on their own biases. A lot of our class discussions revolved around the engineers themselves: how they approach problems, where they fit into society, how their education has taught them these habits and how it impacts their socio-technical projects. As a group of Engineering Studies majors, we thought there was no way we’d fall into the same problematic thinking because of our coursework, the fact that none of us are “technical engineers”, as well as the flexibility and creativity we have in approaching the broad problem of climate education in Easton. 

Despite all of the class discussion, lectures, examples, and readings, our group fell into a very similar pattern in the very beginning. We did our due diligence in researching climate change education across the U.S., in Easton, what climate change education looks like outside the U.S., how U.S. teachers feel about teaching climate change, what the demographics of the city are, as well as what the added benefit of implementing a more robust climate education program would be beyond Easton. At this point we felt we had done enough research and began brainstorming solutions without even having spoken to community partners, teachers or other organizations involved in the climate action plan. We had known that approaching and actually implementing something curricular in public schools would be difficult, due to inherent and warranted bureaucratic and legislative protections, and focused our attention on teachers, since we read that a lot don’t feel qualified to teach the subject properly. This was in part inspired by the Nurture Nature Center’s Data Science education initiative that features after school sessions for teachers to learn more about the subject to integrate into their teachings. We also had a few other ideas on how Lafayette with its many environmental organizations could get involved with education in public schools as well. 

At that point, after having drafted a few possible courses of action and speaking to our peers about other solutions, we decided to bring our ideas to the director of the Nurture Nature Center, who put things into perspective. Something that quickly became apparent throughout our conversation is that climate change education definitely has its place in Easton already, and the Nurture Nature Center bears a lot of the brunt of it: especially as they are the sole recipients of the grant from the climate action plan. Something that came as a bit of a surprise was that kids of the age group we’re targeting for this initiative are very much aware of climate change, but want to know what they can do about it. Throughout our research, we were under the impression that there was a severe lack of awareness of the topic, however it was astonishing to us that we were able to construct basically an entire game plan with multiple alternatives based on information we didn’t even confirm with the community we’re trying to serve. We never thought we’d play the part of the misinformed engineer trying to “educate others”, but we certainly were following the typical route for a brief time at the start of the idea generation process. 

Working through the pivot towards the Climate Symposium work was uncertain at times, however throughout our conversations with not only the Science Director but also the Coordinator of Local Foods, the need for the institutionalization of Lafayette’s role in the symposium in order to expand and support it only became more apparent. Though this is quite the digression from our original, grandiose plan of fundamentally changing the American public school curriculum, we think this is an impactful, tangible way to improve on a pre-existing method of spreading climate change education in Easton, and getting Lafayette College more engaged with the community.

You’re welcome to have a look at our sources next if you insist, or you can take it from the top!