REVISITING THE LIFESTYLE PROJECT

The Life Style Project (Kirk and Thomas, 2003), was introduced at the On the Cutting Edge workshop Teaching About Energy in Geoscience Courses in 2009 (http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/publicpolicy/activities/12517.html). In 2010, Plymouth State University incorporated the Project, in entirety, into the Environmental Science & Policy (ES&P) Dept curriculum. Some sections of the The Life Style Project are also used in ES&P's general education courses.

In the last five years, however, changes in student lifestyles have made the implementation of the project less meaningful and often redundant to many students. New courses on sustainability, taught outside the department, implement parallel concepts with lifecycle and carbon footprint analyses. Since only some of our majors take these courses, and our faculty feel that the Project provides essential perspectives on resource use, the challenge is to make the exercise meaningful to students who encounter it more than once.

This presentation discusses changes that we've made to the Project in response to these pressures, insights from student journals, including some of the more humorous student responses, and solicits ideas for refinement and extension from the audience.

Kirk, K.B., and Thomas, J.J. (2003). The Lifestyle Project, Journal of Geoscience Education, 51 (5), 496-499.