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This specially-designed gateway course introduces Scholars to community partners in the DC area with whom they would work during this gateway course and in their subsequent courses and semesters, hopefully all the way until their graduation. This gateway course can replace either SISU-240 or SISU-250 gateways for the Environment, Sustainability, Global Health or Global Inequality & Development thematic areas.

This course introduces students to social, political economic, (agri)cultural, and epistemic contexts and consequences of what are framed as environmental problems. This entails contextualizing ecological crises within histories of colonialism and anticolonialism and geographies of coloniality and decoloniality, from land defenders to water protectors. Drawing on geopolitical ecology, bioethics, and environmental justice, the class focuses on food and agricultural systems, policies, and equity movements. Specific topics include agrobiodiversity, Indigenous and African Diaspora traditional (agro)ecological knowledge, labor, land use, forests, the U.S. Farm Bill, land-based livelihoods, agrarian climate justice, and struggles for food, water, seed, data, and land sovereignty. Finally, the class weaves in community-based learning opportunities with frontline agrarian movements, field trips, and an introduction to community based research methodology.

Earth Scholars will take a capstone during their fourth year that allows them to work with a nonprofit community-partner on a topic they are interested and passionate about. Through shared vision and collaboration, students get the experience of building a meaningful partnership and relationship with a local organization, gain professional experience, and apply their learning with the support of faculty mentorship and peer support.

This dedicated section of the required research methods course focuses on methods for community-based environmental sustainability and social equity research and action. Scholars will work with a nonprofit community partner on a project as guided by the faculty instructor, diving into the application of research in community settings.