ENVS 330 is an important time to synthesize concentration courses that students have selected and are in the process of taking. Each student proposes their own classes, usually from a range of disciplines that are to be applied towards both a concentration and a thesis. Synthesis of those classes is especially important as students are often going or returning from other countries and experiences, and find that their ideas and areas of interest are changing and adjusting. Now that they have been able to look at their concentration from other perspectives, and know more about the topic that they have been researching, do the questions, situated context, and summary still make sense? How can new experiences and ideas be applied to old ones? Do they need to be scraped altogether? Probably not, but this 330 class is definitely the time to find out.
It also provides a space to work tangibly with research projects (like the aquaculture industry of Willapa Bay, WA) to investigate how research can help direct our learning to finding "solutions" (or a next step) in the areas that we feel most passionate about. It is really easy for environmental problems to seem daunting and overwhelming, and it is important to take the time to ask, what can be done next? What can I as an individual do next? It doesn't need to be joining some grassroots organization, it can be much more abstract than that, but it should provide an outlet for some of those strong feelings that people don't know what to do with. I personally don't feel compelled to join such groups, but a lot of people do, and this class provides me and others with opportunities to see what kinds of solutions are available to topics that we have spent so long studying.
In order to achieve the synthesis desired for this course, the class worked through a number of assignments designed to critically engage with the project-design processes, including concentration goals and progress, group projects on a variety of situated contexts, and capstone proposals for the upcoming thesis class. Of these, I found the concentration proposals to be the most helpful and developed three topics around resilience: pre-disaster conditions, vulnerability, and different disaster types.
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