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The final results are reported to the community client.
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Students in the course take several sediment cores to analyze proxies of environmental change to reconstruct past environments. Sophomores in the Unity College Environmental Stewardship Core curriculum may choose to take a course that introduces lake sedimentation as a tool to study environmental change. We present two examples of ways to sequence student work that ultimately end in student/faculty research projects. We are best equipped to handle suggestions that relate to environmental chemistry and to lake sedimentation owing to the research interests of our geoscience faculty. A wide variety of towns, schools, land trusts, pond associations and other groups approach Unity College with project ideas. Unity College has always been a big proponent of community-based projects so the extension to service learning as a pedagogical technique has been smooth. In the past 5 years we have had a complete turn-over in geoscience and chemistry faculty (2 persons), a shift that has brought new ideas to campus and a different idea about importance of research. Our Environmental Science (geosciences) and Environmental Analysis (chemistry) majors have been showing increasing interest in pursuing graduate school and independent projects in greater and greater depth. Our students really appreciate learning in the field and through participation in projects that impact the communities in which they live and study. Unity College is a very small environmentally-focused undergraduate institution in rural Maine with a student population of less than 600 students. Fortunately, service-learning can be used as a multi-purpose pedagogical technique.
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High teaching loads, tuition-driven budgets, and a dearth of geosciences colleagues all contribute challenges to an intellectual life that includes research as a scholarship endeavor. Geoscientists at small institutions must frequently be very creative about funding and conducting research.