Environmental Sustainability

A student in this group wrote: 

"Having the opportunity to contribute to a resource that raises awareness about our social issue was inspiring to say the least. Starting with how we combined our topics, we realized that each person’s ideas were too specific to try to bundle into a perfectly tied together concept. For example, Abigail said that she wanted to focus on environmental sustainability, specifically through engineering, Mia wanted to zone in on the effects of invasive species, and I focused more on how cities are affected by environmental issues. That’s what led us to choosing the more general idea of environmental sustainability. This helps us not only think about the bigger picture, but also allows for the ability to branch off to the more specific and personal paths that we chose in the background of our overall mural. As for our contributions, we all gave up the information we learned from our engagement and knowledge activities in order to fill in the ideas for the mural. When looking at our final design, you can see many of our own crutches building the picture, like Abigail’s ideas about environmental sustainability being implemented in the final design for example, with the buildings in the background having smog coming out of them. I think the group work helped expand my ideas on environmental sustainability even more because I was hearing these ideas coming from different sources and how their experiences and knowledge fit into the issue. Our final design was something that I was very proud of. It was really nice to see all of our ideas come into fruition and become one big helpful and harmonious mural. Working with my group for this social issue proved that civic engagement is a collective activity and a form of public problem solving. Our cooperation and being able to bring all of our diverse thoughts to the table was crucial as action is harder to achieve without the fuel that is the power in numbers that collectiveness provides."