Abstract
Environmental issues are of especially great importance to younger individuals, such as university students. Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) are a proven methodology for transforming short-term study abroad to yield higher impact and quality student outcomes, especially as they relate to teaching environmental sustainability. This paper offers a review of tested pedagogical frameworks, provides evidence to substantiate this statement from assessment data, and offers insights on how to develop and implement an international CURE. It also shares how embedding CUREs into innovative and high-quality short-term study abroad experiences can work to positively transform the post COVID-19 era of short-term study abroad. Several case studies are presented that document how students’ hands-on involvement in developing questions about real-world sustainability issues, devising and carrying out group research, and presenting their findings affect their acquisition of scientific skills and a sustainability-oriented mindset.
Highlights
This paper describes a high-impact, out-of-the-box, short-term study abroad program that has been creating learning environments wherein students unmask the anthropogenic means of broken ecosystems
Its goals are to teach environmental science and conservation biology on the front line and, in doing so, educate future scientists, teachers, engineers, politicians, leaders, and citizens about how ecosystems work, how humans have broken down their life-sustaining elements, and ways to repair and sustain the biodiverse areas we have left in order to achieve environmental sustainability
For the 2011 course, eight faculty mentors were trained in using the Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) four-step framework, charged with implementing the specific CURE they worked over two years to develop
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Humanity faces this reality—the environment is broken, mostly as a result of negative human impact on the health and biodiversity of our world’s ecosystems [1,2,3,4,5]. This paper describes a high-impact, out-of-the-box, short-term study abroad program that has been creating learning environments wherein students unmask the anthropogenic means of broken ecosystems. It shares how it has transitioned Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) from the traditional classroom to the international arena, reviews the pedagogical frameworks that it utilizes, provides evidence for the success of its approach, and explains its potential to transform the post COVID-19 teaching of environmental sustainability through short-term study abroad
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