MINUTES
Meeting called to order at 1440. Present: G. Selter, S. Rafkin, B. Bornstein, D. Schwarz, D. Jaehne, J. Smith
Minutes of March 20 meeting approved as submitted. The group discussed making an effort to document the history of the initial E.H.& S. seed grant for proposal development. This was not considered essential for inclusion in the minutes.Announcements: Flyers are now circulating announcing the upcoming Forum co-sponsored lecture by Chet Bowers. His talk on "The Practice of an Eco-Justice Pedagogy" will be held on THURSDAY, April 27, from 12:00 to 2:00 in Morris Daily Auditorium. The Forum is co-sponsoring the event with the Institute for Social Responsibility, Ethics, and Education; the Institute for Teaching and Learning; and the Department of Political Science. The Forum urges faculty to encourage their students to attend.
Engineering Student Conference: The Forum will co-sponsor, with IREES, awards for environmentally related student research. The student conference will be held on May 12. B. Bornstein volunteered to serve as the Forum's judge. Using a framework supplied by M. McNeil, the Forum decided to employ a judging scale of 1 to 5 with 1 representing "poor" and 5 representing "excellent." The evaluation criteria will be:
Presentation (design, look, readability, clarity of the communication)
Content (formulation of problem, thoroughness, hypothesis, method, research question, etc.)
Importance (significance of question, merit of project)Scope of Results (what was found? meaningfulness of results)
Familiarity with Subject (ability to explain projectÖ)
IREES/Environmental Forum Student Environmental Awards:
This event will be held, in conjunction with IREES, on June 6. S. Rafkin and D. Jaehne volunteered to serve as the Forum's judges. The same judging scales and criteria will be employed as described above.
E.H.& S. Program: The program approval we thought we had obtained appears now to be subject to approval from the Chancellorís Office (CHOFF). This seems to affect the Environmental Studies portion of the program because it deals with safety and health issues that fall under a program code that is subject to CHOFF review rather than final approval by the local campus office. Correspondence indicates that the approval is being fast-tracked. However, L. Dorosz of Curriculum and Assessment acknowledges that the appearance of the program in the new catalog "is thus not a guarantee that the campus will in fact be authorized to offer the program. As Dorosz says: "stay tuned." The Forum thanked D. Schwarz for tracking this information down. Lacking data, we were not able to discuss the status of outreach and recruitment activities to date.
Curriculum Inventory: D. Schwarz reported that he circulated the curriculum inventory and got four quick responses. He will circulate a follow-up message with an April 28 deadline. The current version is available on the Forumís website.
Website: D. Schwarz has updated the website and added some materials relative to student opportunities. Forum members are encouraged to forward information about environmental scholarships, internships, jobs, research opportunities, conferences, books, etc. that would be of interest to Forum members and to the campus environmental community. Links to IREES and several other organizations have been added.
Recruitment and Outreach: S. Rafkin provided draft 2.0 of the proposed Forum outreach brochure to announce the Forum and to promote the environmental curricula and GE courses on campus. Forum members made suggestions for format and content. There is space for each department to provide two brief lines of commentary text. We decided that we would provide the content for the first version and then let departments comment on changes for the second version. We plan to have a first version ready for the late April advising days. There was some question whether to list the departments and their offerings as "courses of study" or as "programs." D. Schwarz will check into this. Rafkin will circulate the corrected draft by the end of the week.
New Business: The question of the Forum's role at Earth Day was raised and the Forum affirmed its earlier decision to support but not to be an active participant in such campus events. The Forum's role in supporting its own Speaker Series was also raised and, again, the Forum affirmed its earlier decision to support campus events where departments take the initiative. Some possible public forum topics were discussed. At this time, the Forum does not wish to be initiator or producer of such projects.
Next Meeting: Our next meeting will be on TUESDAY, May 16, from 1430 to 1600 in SCI 127.
Meeting Adjourned at 1540.
Minutes respectfully submitted by D. Jaehne