Cosmetics: What are the ingredients in your cosmetic products? Do you know what these products actually do to your body? Did you know that some eye shadow actually contains lead... and is applied to some of the most sensitive skin on your body. Yikes... anyone for lead poisoning?? These students found a great website that you could use to check out your own products... http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/
Water Conservation: What can you do to reduce water use in your home? This group challenged their families to take on 4 specific actions that would lead to a reduced water conservation. Their strategies were to turn off the tap and use a the plug, not rinsing the dishes, taking shorter showers, and flushing the toilet less often.
Energy Conservation: Reducing energy conservation this group investigated what they could do to reduce their personal energy consumption. Turning off lights, reducing heat, walking, not consuming, etc.
Transformers: Aware of the cognitive dissonance that occurs between what we think about environmental values and how we practice living, this group immersed in personal transformation strategies to identify and remove barriers to action.
Connect(ed): After arriving at the campus, and finding a lack of connection to the place, this group worked towards developing a sense of place for themselves and the rest of the class.
Foodies: In an era of fast food and drive throughs, it is time to question our foods origin and real nutritional value. This group investigated the local food provider for local produce, nutritional information, and possible steps that could be implemented.
From the 2011 Environmental Education Pre-service Educator class (these descriptions were written by the students)
Preserve your health NOT your food was an action learning group that questioned the quality of the food we eat. The first step we took as a group was to track what we ate for one week and to research the ingredients that were in our food. After this first step, we realized there were many disturbing issues surrounding the food we eat. To make it easier to research, we split the group into two sections. One section focused on preservatives and additives. The other section focused on pesticide and herbicide use. All of which are methods to prolong the life of food whether for increasing the shelf life in grocery stores or for mass production of produce to travel long distances without decaying. Since we all led different lifestyles, we decided each of us were to have our own individual actions. Some of us switched three to five items in our daily diet to preservative/additive free or to organic solutions while others ate one preservative/additive free meal a day. We found a few roadblocks within these actions. The biggest roadblock was time. For example, I chose to eliminate store bought treats and munchies by replacing the items with homemade alternatives, such as chocolate chip cookies or fruit. However, time caused me to fall back on buying store bought items because I did not have the time to make these items from scratch or to go through the process of washing and cutting the fruit. This led into another roadblock which was poor planning. I found I was able to be successful in my action providing I planned for it such as meal planning and creating shopping lists. The other roadblock some had issues with was financial. Organic food is not inexpensive as there is a higher cost to purchase organic. There were some successes and some failure in the actions. However, this action learning group strategy was successful as it was very engaging. It helped to build group work strategies since group settings require communication and collaboration to be successful. The activity also required us to research and to come up with our own actions which helped us to be responsible for our own learning.
Food Waste Our group project looked at Food Waste. We started this project wanting to educate ourselves about the issues of food waste and help us to take actions that better the environment. A positive outcome to this environmental issue that we took action on was the fact that by doing simple and achievable tasks such as meal planning our group realized how much time it saved and money too as grocery lists were part of some member’s actions. Not only were we benefiting our lives but we found that by being prepared and watching how much we are making (when we cook) we helped to reduce our food waste. Of course all members took different actions but in the end we came to the same result and goal of wasting less food. The knowledge this project brought to us came with a strong message that we now hope to educate others on and keep working on lowering our food waste as well as encouraging others too.
Paper Princesses The Paper Princesses ALGP was focused around Reducing, Reusing and Recycling paper and paper products. We focused on this because we felt that this issue was something that is very relevant to us as teachers and in our everyday lives. Our actions included personal as well as group actions which involved: reducing and recycling our paper use within our homes and personal lives, bringing reducing and recycling into our work places, educating and raising awareness of the effects of paper use and why we should reduce our paper use. Our group actions included: a facebook event to raise awareness and create dialogue between our peers about reducing and recycling paper. We started this group to tell people what we were doing and how they can also join us in our actions. Another one of our biggest actions was the “paper drive” that we did within a Regina community. We combined with another group and held a paper drive which was an extremely effective and reflective process for us. We also decided upon working on a “Resource Roundup” which allowed us to look for and share “eco friendly” paper alternatives available to people in our community. We felt that each of these actions was very beneficial for us and allowed us to really think about our issue and contribute to the project. We saw great results not only from our Group Actions but from our Personal Actions as well and are confident in saying that we have made a difference and change within our lives. We also know that we can take what we have learned, as well as the ALGP strategy, into our future classrooms to use because it is a very beneficial way of learning and becoming personally involved in a project such as this.
From the 2010 Environmental Education Pre-service Educator class (these descriptions were written by the students)
Fast Food Avengers Our project centred on the reduction of food packaging. Each one of us chose a different action. While three of us looked to eliminate fast food from our diets (and thus eliminate the food packaging), one of us chose to use reusable containers and another aimed to buy less foods wrapped in packaging (reduce the amount of overall packaging). As a group we all followed the same twelve steps but each of our actions were different - a different way of accomplishing the same goal.
Food 4 Thought Our group looked at issues surrounding Food Consumerism: community supported agriculture (eating locally), food waste, coffee and fair trade practices, issues around corn, finding locally available food sources. Food consumerism is a broad area, and as individuals coming to the group we had different ideas of what food consumerism meant to each of us. We decided that all of our concerns were important and warranted research so we chose to jigsaw the issue of food consumerism. Each individual was doing research on an aspect that is important and/or relevant to his or her personal lives. By doing this, our group is able to learn more about the different aspects of food consumerism and thus are able to better educate ourselves and in turn act on educating others. We have created a blog in which we are able to share our research and resources as well make it available to the general public so that they can also become informed through our research. We are hoping that it may inspire someone to want to create his or her own action plan. http://foodforthoughtactionproject.blogspot.com/
Green Giants Our group focused on pollution and waste. We narrowed the subject down to topics that people can relate to everyday: personal care products, emissions, cleaning products, and clothing. We all chose this because we knew there were many issues revolving around it and we can all relate to the topic; we can all contribute. Our group feels passionate about the topic and we feel there needs to be change in our world, or else we will be facing hard times. We value the air we breathe; the pollution in urban areas has increased astronomically. We worried about future generations; we knew that this was a serious problem and we wanted to make a change. Our mission was to create personal change and educate ourselves on the short and long term effects of consumerism. After coming to an understanding of our personal practices we then made an outreach to our community. We talked to our families, friends and university students and informed them about the issues revolving around pollution and waste. Our overall vision and mission was to simply reduce, reuse and recycle. We looked at ideas of consumerism and how we as the consumers are ultimately leading our world into turmoil; with all the pollution and waste.
Furry Friends Having a framework such as the 12 steps kept us focused and enabled us to stay motivated throughout the action plan process. The reflective practice allowed us to find issues that are important to us and to also find and conquer barriers or restraints. The group charter created a mutual understanding between group members that allowed us to work fairly and efficiently in our group. By participating in the action we are able to gain new perspective in which we can effectively share with others through our experience. Through our journey we were able to help out another local organization, which made us as a group feel like we contributed to a great cause while completing our project.
Greener Keeners Our group began our journey by coming together and choosing a common issue that effects all of us. We brainstormed various ideas for creating actions to implement with this group. We started researching resources to help us on our journey throughout this assignment. We created personal goals for each individual in our group - going outside for an hour everyday. Using our group charter was extremely useful for our group to go back and reference when we met together. It helped us "get back on track" when we felt our plans were not going in the right direction. These "road blocks" lead to Step 7: Measuring Success. This was the most important step in our group because our whole group met with our professor and made a plan on how to deal with the issues we were having. Once we identified and recognized these issues (boundaries step 8) we used motivations to overcome the boundaries. This was mainly our whole process throughout the 12 steps. The action learning group project is not finished even though the presentation is! We will be getting together to celebrate our success after finals by getting outside and unwinding after a few stressful weeks!!
Impact Reducers We choose to tackle the issues surround consumerism and packaging. We went through the steps as a group but we each choose to take an individual action; that had the most relevance on our day-to-day lives. The action plan helped us focus and connect these different issues. Going through the steps scaffolded our journey and guided our planning. The actions we took were: changing our bathroom habits, looking at our clothing consumption, changing our food packaging habits, examine the practices of our places of employment. We developed a survey to identify areas of high waste production and high consumption through this process. For a communication tool we established a blog and a google documents account so everything could be communal and easy to share.