Working for a Better Tomorrow
As the limits of the earth’s natural resources are becoming clearer, humankind faces pivotal decisions about our lifestyle choices. With Corvallis at the helm of our nation’s sustainability practices, “The Corvallis 2020 Vision Statement” was created with the intention of reducing our carbon footprint in a variety of ways by the year 2020. The City Council and the Sustainability Coalition have partnered up to make the vision a reality by creating a Sustainability Action Plan.
“This is the most difficult thing, the most important thing that our community will embark upon over the next number of years – to create a plan that envisions a sustainable Corvallis, a community that understand its impacts in the world, a community that understands that it can be a role model for communities across America and across the world,” Corvallis Mayor Charlie Tomlinson said in a Town Hall meeting.
To Distinguished Philosophy Professor Kathleen Moore, the Action Plan provides a unique opportunity to get her Philosophy 121: Reasoning and Writing students thinking critically about their community.
“The question that a professor asks herself, is how can this class be as important as it possibly can be and how can it be usefully connected to the skills a student is going to need to make a positive difference in the world?” Moore said. “How can I can I make that course connect students to their place and encourage the skills they need to live responsibly and to be leaders? These students are going to be the ones who are called to the greatest exercise of the human imagination that the world has ever seen. How can we prepare students for that?”
Inspired by a conversation with Corvallis Mayor Charlie Tomlinson, Moore decided to center the course on analyzing the Action Plan’s 12 goals as proposed by nearly 600 community members.
“The goal of the course was then to ask the students to bring together all of their skills of reasoning and writing to write a white paper that would recommend to the City Council to modify, adopt or not adopt one of those goals,” Moore said.
As the term progressed, the students applied newly acquired skills to analyze a variety of topics from buying locally produced food, incorporating education about sustainability into the classroom, LEED certified buildings, cutting energy consumption in half, the possibility of a monorail in the Willamette Valley and a 75 percent recycling goal among others.
“The tendency in a critical thinking course is to pander to students and to have them write articles about whether there should be drinking allowed in the dorms or those sorts of local issues that we think are interesting to students,” Moore said. “That underestimates students hugely. Students really care about the world that they are going to live in and raise their families in and they care about issues beyond their own home.”
In the beginning of the term, Mayor Tomlinson attended each of Moore’s two class sessions and discussed the Action Plan and projects with the students. On the very last day of class, students presented their research to City Council members Dan Brown of Ward 4 and Patricia Daniels of Ward 2.
Although more students dropped the course than usual once the project was announced, it proved to be more than just an assignment to junior Jenna Caparoso.
“As an out-of-state student, not only was the project interesting and for a good cause, but it allowed me to become a little more familiar with the Corvallis community,” the Human Development and Family Sciences major said. “It’s assignments like these that truly make college an unforgettable experience.”
By Taryn Luna