Kathleen Kevany

The TREEhouse: A hybrid model for experiential learning in environmental education

ABSTRACT This article addresses the need to integrate experiential learning into environmental and sustainability curriculum and considers the challenges faced by academic institutions in providing relevant experiential learning opportunities at an appropriate scale. Through an experiential case study, this article illustrates how adopting a “hybrid approach” served to expand traditional perception and infrastructure at Dalhousie University, Faculty of Agriculture, while affording graduate students a space for developing knowledge through the experience of doing. This article discusses the barriers and presents the methodology used to achieve a paradigm shift. This overcomes traditional approaches and could be duplicated for infrastructure transformation into active laboratories for the provision of experiential learning tools for environmental education programs.

Transitioning to Sustainable Food Choices: A Course Design

This paper provides curriculum ideas for increasing fluency and literacy around the moral and practical value of transitioning to sustainable diets. By combining systems theory, feminist spirituality, mindfulness, and experiential learning for a semester-long course, learners in higher education and community settings become exposed to more holistic analyses that examines moral, ethical as well as intellectual approaches to sustainable living. Analyses of food systems reveal that whole-food, plant-based diets low in processed foods—sustainable diets in short—are associated with lower premature death and chronic diseases and with lower greenhouse gas emissions, cleaner air, and water and more equitable and compassionate care for humans and animals. Yet achieving reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change along with cancers, heart disease, and obesity have been elusive. Increasing opportunities to align goals for health, environment, community equity and personal values prompt the recommendation that more education for sustainability in humanities is essential. Additional research on the various implications of diets, including the moral and physical, could illuminate examples of successful transitions in diets to inform fuller academic programming.

Shifting Food Systems: Increasing Well-being Through Plant-Based Approaches

HighlightsUrbanization and globalization disrupt connections to foods origins and power.More food and less emissions arise from reduced livestock production and consumption.Rationalizing humans, disregard science, morals, and own well‐being for meat.Sobering to recognize that 90% of heart disease and other inflictions are preventable.Disrupting concealment over disclosure, sales over safety, and money over morality. &NA; Growing evidence reveals food production systems and consumption practices contradict goals for environmental well‐being and population health. This interdisciplinary paper reviews research for impacts from diets on non‐communicable human diseases, climate change, and animal well‐being. With increasing pressures to innovate and reduce economic as well as emotional costs associated with ill‐health, our recommendations could positively impact policy.

Appreciating Living Well in Two Rural Nova Scotian Communities

ABSTRACT This article employs appreciative inquiry to investigate factors that mediate or foster rural well-being in Tatamagouche and Advocate Harbour, Nova Scotia. Study participants identified many factors involved in bolstering well-being: community engagement, an appreciation of the natural magnificence, vibrant arts and culture, citizen efficacy, and a sense of shared responsibility. They also included environmental sustainability, healthy lifestyles, self-sufficiency, being hospitable, compassionate, and responsible citizens with playful and grateful spirits. Further study is needed to substantiate the factors that could help mediate rural well-being.