The IU Research and Teaching Preserve Field Lab is a five-minute drive from campus, and features a modular classroom with UITS technology as well as field and laboratory space, equipment, and supplies. The property is equipped to host courses across campus; past courses include Field and Laboratory Ecology, Biodiversity, Perceiving Beauty through Attentiveness, and Wilderness Survival.
The Sustainability Scholars Program gives select undergraduates the opportunity to conduct sustainability research for one year alongside an IU faculty member.
Consider how your research efforts and related outreach might be accomplished by working with the IPE or the IURTP. For example, faculty have partnered with us to build meaningful outreach efforts into their grant proposals, through substantive programming we offer to IU students, K-12 students, and the larger Bloomington and Indiana community.
Sustainability requires a transdisciplinary approach, linking theories and methods to disparate fields and finding effective teaching mechanisms for students with diverse backgrounds and capabilities. This program aims to create a campus-based community network of sustainability faculty who teach, or are interested in teaching, sustainability related courses and share a common language and understanding of core sustainability concepts. This program is designed to facilitate cross-department interaction through discussions of research-based sustainability learning principles.
The Sustainability Course Development Fellowship (SCDF), sponsored by Sustain IU and the Integrated Program in the Environment (IPE), supports faculty teaching of topics related to sustainability and environmental literacy at the IU Bloomington campus. This represents a component of a broad-based initiative to develop sustainability curriculum and a community of faculty engaged in its instruction. Interested faculty can apply for a summer fellowship to create a new sustainability-focused course, or significantly altering an existing course to include a more substantial sustainability focus. Fellows receive an average of $4,500 to support summer course development work. Proposals are solicited annually each spring.
Together with Sustain IU, this award program is designed to support collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts of students to develop new, externally-funded research related to sustainability. Successful proposals have clearly stated goals and objectives, employ appropriate methods and tools, and address sustainability challenges, such as resource stewardship, assessment and mitigation of environmental impacts caused by human activity, and institutional and societal responses to ecological change. If you mentor a student who is looking for funding for their sustainability-related project, the SRDG program may be a good fit for them.