The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Mount Holyoke a $300,000 grant for the Center for Environmental Literacy (CEL) to begin developing the curricular resources and technological tools to integrate environmental and ecological principles across MHC's curriculum. Aaron Ellison, Marjorie Fisher Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and director of the CEL, and Thomas Millette, associate professor of earth and environment, will lead the project, and faculty members, Mellon-supported postdoctoral fellows, and students will collaborate. The project will be overseen by the Center for Environmental Literacy Steering Committee, which is composed of faculty, staff, and students.
Inaugurated last year, the CEL's mission is to ensure that all MHC students develop a substantial grasp of environmental issues as a criterion for graduation and to ensure that Mount Holyoke is a center of excellence for environmental education and literacy. The principal aim of the Mellon-supported project is to develop curricular resources that will support the continuing propagation of environmental and ecological principles across MHC's curriculum in courses ranging from biology and history to geology and economics. This goal will be achieved by embedding an interdisciplinary environmental education program in the broader college curriculum.
The majority of the Mellon funds will be used to support postdoctoral fellows, who will conduct research while assisting faculty and students in developing an ecological database of the campus and surrounding environments. To develop the database, an inventory will be done of natural resources and ecosystem processes on campus. When completed, the database will serve as the basis for a wide variety of locally based curricular units and student research projects in many disciplines, and will enable the College to shift the teaching of the environmental sciences from more traditional classroom-based lectures and labs to problem-based modules that require hands-on learning.
The postdoctoral fellows will collaborate with faculty and students to develop an interactive, Web-based, spatial data server system. This system will allow faculty, students, and community members to explore the regional environment through accessible data, maps, and thematic overlays. On an interactive Web site, faculty and students from diverse fields of study will be able to share information and research on their common ground: Mount Holyoke's campus. "The power of a Web-served ecological atlas is that it will provide an easily accessible wealth of local environmental data for which curricular uses are limited only by the imagination," says Millette.
Ultimately, the MHC campus will be used as a natural laboratory for the study of landscape ecology and ecological processes. "We have chosen to use landscape ecology as a foundation for instilling environmental literacy because it is a discipline that connects the biological and physical sciences to the social dimensions of environmental issues," says Ellison. "We have a spectacular array of natural and human-modified ecosystems on our campus and surrounding environments, and MHC faculty are presently designing new place-based courses that will take advantage of the natural and historical resources of our own region."
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