BUILDING COMMUNITY THROUGH GROUP PROJECTS

Northfield Minnesota (home of two colleges – Carleton and St. Olaf) is a small, but growing community within an agricultural landscape of rural SE Minnesota. Most college students come to Carleton College from an urban or suburban lifestyle, familiar neither with small towns nor rural issues. “Civic engagement” projects in geology and environmental studies classes help students develop a “sense of place” about the local area, introduce them to practical applications of their academic work, and reinforce habits of community involvement.

Recent student projects at Carleton have a) defined a preliminary wellhead protection area to protect the community water supply; b) created an oversized flow chart of city development processes for the benefit of city staff, elected officials and developers; c) proposed minimum standards for riparian buffer zones to protect streams; d) presented alternatives to wholesale streambank reconstruction in the wake of a severe flash flood; e) designed a preliminary Natural Resources Inventory for the City of Northfield; and f) completed a synoptic survey of water chemistry in streams, lakes, agricultural tile and holding ponds, among many other projects. In addition to city and county staff, students have partnered with local conservation organizations, such as the Cannon River Watershed Partnership. Student projects don’t substitute for good consulting or staff work, but they can fill in gaps, provide baseline data, summarize background, suggest question that consultants can later focus on, and educate the community and its leaders. In many cases, these student projects are applications of knowledge or methods that are already widely known in academic circles.

Major challenges to academic civic engagement projects include: a) time management and coordinating academic and public schedules, b) town-gown communication, c) record-keeping and institutional memory and d) rethinking pedagogy and student assessment.