University of New England

Green Learning Community

All first year students in the Environmental Studies program participate in this year-long experience, which integrates courses in biology, environmental issues, and literature and/or economics. As you attend your classes, you will often find the same topic presented from different perspectives and even in different media. Your courses will take you beyond textbooks to deal with real-world issues that require a variety of ways of knowing.

The Learning Community places high value on active learning.  Our program asks students to not merely learn information, but to make sense out of it through discussion, debate, and problem solving. Classes in the Learning Community are small enough to allow significant interaction among students and faculty, and the common course schedule allows us to rearrange class meetings to permit field trips away from the classroom.

Early in the fall, the entire Learning Community will travel to the Maine Conservation School, a camp on a mountain lake, for an overnight retreat to get to know each other better, and to plan our goals for the year.  In the spring we travel to the Wells Reserve at Laudholm Farm for our second retreat at an old saltwater farm on the Atlantic ocean.

View a presentation created by one of our GLC students about his experience in the Learning Community.