Technology links on all campuses enable students to enroll in a single course at another institution and faculty to team-teach courses across two institutions. As faculty have met their peers, and perhaps more importantly, as students have met faculty at other CIEL schools, there is more excitement about these possibilities.

Budding Curricular Collaborations 2009:

CIEL Border Studies Program

CIEL envisions a program of study that supports the development of applied global perspectives and reimagines the relationship between learning, research, and “border” communities.  As the economic interdependencies, flows of people, and environmental, human rights, and cultural crises wrought by globalization continue to spread out from territorial border regions, national interiors increasingly experience the social and cultural bisections described by scholars and community organizations as “borderization”.  By networking existing courses, programs, and collaborative research, The CIEL Border Studies Program brings students, faculty, and community members together to address the problems facing populations most negatively impacted by these global forces of integration/segregation.

Foodshed Research and Education Project

Given the geographic distribution of schools in CIEL, a great diversity of ecological and social landscapes is represented within the consortium.  We propose to take advantage of this geographic representation, as well as the shared value for innovative learning held by CIEL institutions, to implement a foodshed research and education project.  The research component will involve one or more faculty from participating CIEL institutions conducting interdisciplinary investigations on the past, present and possible futures of regional foodsheds in which the schools are located.  Faculty from a wide range of fields, including history, agroecology, hydrology, climatology, anthropology, economics, ethnobiology, and geography are encouraged to participate.  The research will reveal how local food cultures and agricultures developed historically, how these changed with the industrialization of agriculture in the twentieth century, and how communities in the short and long term might best respond to the current challenges of diminishing fossil fuels, climate change, globalization, immigration policy, as well as others.