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About the SCALe Program
The Sustainability and Climate Applied Learning (SCALe) program situates Duke University as a living backdrop for sustainability and climate change education, anchoring learners and educators with a local yet scalable perspective of these concepts in the place where we study, work, live and play.
Through mini grants, course-based projects, and internships the SCALe program cultivates transformative learning collaborations between students, faculty and staff to address real-world challenges and opportunities at Duke.
SCALe experiences take shape at the intersections of social and physical campus activity, hands-on experiential education, service, applied research and community engagement.
Scaling Impact
Learning from the world around us through experiential and applied approaches is a compelling way to understand complex issues and interact with real life implications of climate change and sustainability topics.
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The goals of the SCALe program are to:
- Catalyze sustainability and climate applied learning experiences both in and out of the classroom.
- Bridge connections for impactful learning between Duke students, faculty and staff to investigate real-world campus needs.
- Foster a campus learning community to share ideas and best practices for exploring Duke as a living learning laboratory.
Sustainability and Climate Applied Learning in Action
- Place-based and project-based experiential learning opportunities position students to make a positive impact on global challenges at a local scale that feels relevant and offers a sense of belonging and purpose.
- From real challenges and campus case studies, students can build skills around data collection and analysis, reporting, community outreach, stakeholder engagement, co-creation, reflection and more.
- Interacting with the campus as a “Living Learning Laboratory” gives students a glimpse of change management, innovation and teamwork principles.
- The outputs of real-world learning efforts can advance support and tangible outcomes for Duke. From developing new engagement programs to making suggestions that support the evolution of campus operations, students have always played an integral role in advancing Duke's sustainability progress.
Students in Peter Malin's class observe and interact with contractors drilling a deep borehole on Duke's Central Campus as part of a feasibility study to investigate whether water can be stored beneath the ground's surface for the purpose of regulating the temperature of buildings on campus more efficiently and sustainably. This quest for Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage is a collaboration that intersects across campus facilities work, academics and research.
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In collaboration with Duke Facilities Management, students band trees on East Campus to prevent canker worm damage.
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Duke undergraduate students in Bio 202 take a break from the walls of a traditional classroom and tour the Duke greenhouses to anchor their learning in a real-world setting.
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Juliet Wong, assistant professor of coastal and marine climate change, teaches students about sea urchins and other marine invertebrates at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina. Wong, a Nicholas School of the Environment faculty member, uses a combination of physiological and molecular approaches to study how marine invertebrates respond to their changing environments.
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Sarah Parsons, an entomologist and lecturing fellow of the Thompson Writing Program, led a Writing 101 class, "It's a Bug's World," on a field trip to forage for insects in an old Durham baseball field near central campus. Parsons, who studies how urban environments affect insects, gathered data about the variety of insects at the site. Parsons’ class focused on helping students dissect scientific journal articles about insects and communicate research to a variety of audiences, including scientific peers and policy makers.
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More Information
The SCALe program operates in alignment with the goals of the Duke Climate Commitment which is a call to action to weave climate and sustainability into every aspect of the University’s core missions of education, research, sustainable operations, community partnerships, and external engagement.
- In an effort to create an immersive, interdisciplinary educational ecosystem for learning about climate and sustainability in and out of the classroom, the SCALe program stretches across disciplines, interconnects campus operations and academics, and promotes collaboration across campus boundaries.
- Duke University addresses climate and sustainability challenges as a living demonstration site of cutting-edge sustainability practices, an incubator of innovation, and a crucible for shaping the next generation of student leaders who will affect positive change in the world.
Questions? Email Emily Bilcik, Assistant Director of Sustainability and Climate Applied Learning.