Goshen College has been offering summer agriculture education since 2008 and fall sustainability education since 2012 through Merry Lea. But beginning in the fall of 2017, the college will be offering students complete majors in these rapidly-emerging fields. This announcement is in some ways the culmination of a lot of work by many people, and in others just the beginning of an even more robust collaboration between staff on campus and at Merry Lea.
These new majors, called Sustainable Food Systems (SFS) and Sustainability Studies (SS), will build on the current residential programs at Merry Lea and a range of existing courses on campus taught in a variety of departments. A third new major, Sustainability Management, has been created out of the business department’s strong foundation in ethical business leadership.
A Common Core
One of the more exciting elements is that students in all three majors will share a common core experience of six courses, in which they will be introduced to the themes and patterns of analysis that are common to any sustainability practitioner. As first-year students, they will engage in introductory courses together before diversifying their studies in subsequent years. Discussion and reading seminar courses offered throughout their time will continue to bring them back together with their colleagues to work out the intersections and sustainability implications of experiences they are having in disparate classes. Finally, senior capstone projects will put small teams of students from the different sustainability majors into collaboration with a community partner to work towards sustainability. In short, these majors will truly be an interdisciplinary experience that will prepare students to lead in their communities in ways that are increasingly needed in our world.
New Themes, More Collaboration
For Merry Lea, these new majors create several important changes in our work. First, because our residential experiences are now embedded in a broader suite of courses on campus, we can emphasize different themes. For example, beginning in 2018 the summer agroecology program will no longer include a course on marketing and management, since students in the SFS major will take several business courses during their work on campus. Instead, they’ll have a class on animal husbandry along with a new course on food systems that connects work at Merry Lea’s farm to broader questions of food production & distribution.
Secondly, guiding students through these new majors will give faculty at Merry Lea much greater opportunity to collaborate with our colleagues on campus. We will work together with them on course design, advise student research and facilitate joint projects with partner groups in the community. We look forward to co-teaching seminar courses with a number of colleagues and helping students to navigate the many career options in this area. We are excited about the prospects of energetically recruiting new students to
attend Goshen College to study in these crucial new fields. And we are glad to be working in a more unified fashion than ever before to help support the academic mission of the college. We believe that its goals of peace-making and creation care are more important than they have ever been! Ω
