Watershed UGA: A “Hyper-Local” Initiative Promoting Interdisciplinary Engagement through Campus Streams

While individual faculty members often bear the primary responsibility for finding, cultivating, and sustaining appropriate projects and placements for relevant service-learning, it is becoming clear that creating support structures through real-world, big-picture-issue oriented initiatives can be especially helpful for developing new experiential learning opportunities (e.g., The Sencer Model Series, http://www.sencer.net/Resources/models.cfm). This presentation highlights work underway on one campus to help establish an initiative that brings together an intentionally multidisciplinary set of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates, for a hyper-local, campus-based issue area: on-campus streams and watersheds. This presentation describes the process and current outcomes of creating a new initiative, Watershed UGA, at the University of Georgia. UGA is a large, public, research intense, land- and sea-grant, Carnegie community engaged institution, with nearly 35,000 students across 17 schools and colleges. The Watershed UGA initiative uses the three on-campus streams (which are mostly paved over and have “issues” ranging from invasive species to erosion to contaminants) and their affiliated watershed areas as an organizing, local-place-based structure for engaging students around STEM issues including ecology, biology, and sustainability, while also incorporating other disciplines including art, composition, geography, and more. Some forty different courses are engaging in the initiative during the current academic year, including through service-learning, research, and content development. The session details how faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates are involved, and showcases online content developed (e.g., videos, content modules, and resources) as well as service-learning, community partnerships, assessment, and co-curricular components. The presentation also shares feedback, assessment outcomes, and lessons learned during the first year of implementation and recommendations for other institutions interested in similar initiatives