Changes to Environmental Studies Major at WWC
Iris Seaton | March 16, 2023
Change is in the air at Warren Wilson College (WWC). Several majors are being added to the school’s offerings, new staff is being hired and for environmental studies students there will be exciting new choices to consider. These changes will be available to students beginning in the fall semester of 2023.
Environmental Studies is WWC’s most highly enrolled major. In the coming months, the college will be making major changes to the program in the hopes of improving student experiences.
Perhaps most notably, the environmental studies major itself will be split into three separate majors. Currently declared students will have the option to complete their current trajectory or switch to one of the new majors. As of spring 2023, students majoring in environmental studies have the choice to concentrate in the following fields:
Sustainable Agriculture
Environmental Education
Ecological Forestry
Environmental Policy and Justice
Conservation
Society and Water and Earth Resources
With these changes implemented, the school will now offer the following majors instead:
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Environmental Studies, focusing on the humanities aspect of environmental science. The major will include a small number of hard science courses, focusing instead on social justice, communications and other aspects of the major.
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Environmental Science, focusing on the hard sciences and requiring a smaller amount of humanities courses.
Sustainable Agriculture and Food Studies, a new major focusing on agriculture and food. Students in this major may choose to study horticulture, food justice, farming systems and more.
A few concentrations will be offered within these majors. Environmental education will be offered as a part of the environmental studies B.A., and ecological forestry as a part of the environmental science B.S. Students will also have the option not to choose a concentration.
Liesl Erb, chair of the environmental studies department, explained some of the feedback from students that led to the decision to rearrange the department.
“Everybody has their strengths, right,” Erb said. “So we were seeing that tension from a lot of students. That tension of folks thinking they were majoring in something, but they're not. And that's why they weren't taking as many agriculture classes, for example, or as many forestry classes as they'd like. So we're trying to be more transparent.”
Jay Roberts, provost and dean of faculty at WWC, touched on comments received from students regarding the functionality of the school that led to these changes.
“The student feedback was that it is a rat's nest of requirements — can you please simplify it, make it easier to navigate, et cetera,” Roberts said. “So that was the curriculum streamlining bucket. The bucket of what I would call enhancing and growing our curricular offerings is bucket number two. And that's really to think about how do we attract new students to the college? And how do we retain the students we have?”
Roberts was also enthusiastic about the new Center for Working Lands that will interact closely with the majors.
“You take our existing infrastructure — farm, forest and garden — but you think about them not just as activities, but as ways students can both do research and work and community engagement that's focused on solutions,” Roberts said. “So an example would be climate forward agriculture. That is going to be one of the solution areas that the Center for Working Lands has. So students, through the work program can engage in sustainable agriculture practices, through community engagement.”
Additions to the school such as the Center for Working Lands, the addition of a Communications major and the hiring of new staff will all relate back to one another, Roberts said.
“It sort of overlaps, you know, in a Venn diagram way, with the work we're trying to do in the environmental studies department,” Roberts said. “They're not the same because you could be a major in communications and still engage with the Center for Working Lands because of course, if you're doing food justice, we just as much need to communicate about that as we do need to study what kind of vegetables to grow. So it's very interdisciplinary that way.”
Overall, the school hopes to make it easier for students to study exactly what they are interested in without difficulties finding spots in required courses or taking classes that do not relate to their career goals as well as they would like.
“Our goal for all of this is to provide more options and flexibility for students to make it easier for them to graduate and study what they want,” Erb said.
Students with further questions can reach out to Erb at lerb@warren-wilson.edu.