Category: Roosevelt

Position Available: Assistant Professor of Sustainability Studies at RU

Roosevelt University is seeking an Assistant Professor in Sustainability Studies for a tenure-track position beginning 15 August 2013. Applicants should have the ability to teach multiple courses in the Sustainability Studies (SUST) undergraduate curriculum as well as interdisciplinary social and/or natural science seminars to adult learners in the Professional and Liberal Studies (PLS) program. Teaching load is six courses per year. Courses are offered at Roosevelt’s Chicago and Schaumburg campuses as well as online.

Duties: (1) Teaching courses within the SUST major as well as adult general education seminars with the PLS program. (2) Assisting with SUST program development through curriculum enhancement and assessment, service learning project development, community outreach, and online social media writing. (3) Maintaining an active scholarly research program within one’s academic discipline and/or the emerging field of sustainability studies. (4) Advising undergraduate students. (5) Performing departmental, college, university, and professional service.

Roosevelt’s Sustainability Studies program, founded in 2010, is the first of its kind in the Chicago region. Housed within the Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies, it maintains a close relationship with the College’s PLS program, a longstanding leader in educating returning adult students. Roosevelt University was founded in 1945 on the principle that higher education should be available to all academically qualified students. Today, Roosevelt is the fourth most ethnically diverse college in the Midwest (U.S. News and World Report, 2011) and a national leader in preparing students to assume meaningful, purposeful roles in the global community.

Minimum Qualifications: PhD or terminal degree in a sustainability-related discipline (or interdisciplinary field) within the natural or social sciences. Active scholarly research program and the ability to apply research to the classroom and communicate findings to a general audience. Evidence of excellence and versatility in teaching. Ability to teach with technology and in multiple formats (such as hybrid and online courses). Understanding of interdisciplinary teaching and curriculum development.

Highly Desirable Criteria: Expertise in multiple areas within sustainability, especially urban agriculture, energy and climate change, and/or waste and recycling. Experience in service learning initiatives and/or academic program development. Experience with both adult and traditional-age students. Enthusiasm for teaching general education seminars as well as more specialized SUST courses. Experience teaching critical thinking, research, and writing.

To Apply: Visit the Roosevelt HR webpage and click on “Full Time Faculty” to find the SUST Assistant Professor listing. Applicants should provide a letter of interest outlining their teaching experience, research program, and suitability for the position; an up-to-date curriculum vitae; and a list of three to five professional references.

For More Information: Consult the SUST program website for details on the  curriculum, faculty, and degree options for students. Applicants may address questions to the search committee chair and SUST program director, Professor Michael Bryson (mbryson@roosevelt.edu).

Application deadline is 1 December 2012. Position begins on 15 August 2013.

Accelerate 77 Share Fair Celebrates Sustainability in Chicago

Looking for a cool sustainability-themed event this coming weekend? Here you go: this Saturday from 10am to 4pm at Truman College on Chicago’s North Side, the Institute for Cultural Affairs will host the “Accelerate 77” Share Fair that brings together people and organizations working on all kinds of sustainability initiatives in each of Chicago’s 77 community areas.

Back in the spring of 2012, my SUST 210 Honors seminar at Roosevelt’s Chicago Campus did on-the-ground research in small groups in 5 different communities in Chicago: Fuller Park, Rogers Park, Little Village, and the North and South halves of the Loop. Their research added to that of students at several other Chicago colleges and universities, as students fanned out across the city to learn about urban sustainability initiatives and meet people from every walk of life, in every neighborhood of the city.

As the ICA Share Fair’s website describes, there’s a ton going on this Saturday:

Exhibitors: Come Meet Your Neighborhood Assets

The main room will be filled with representatives of all 77 communities of Chicago. These representatives have been identified as leaders in their respective communities, but a leader can be embodied in many ways. We work towards realising a sustainable Chicago, the foundations of which rely on economic, cultural, and social sustainability. You can expect to see examples of urban agriculture, green technology, and alternative energy, but then also so much more! Each leading program has their own methodology in how to encorporate/encourage environmentalism in their neighborhoods. True to the richness of the Chicago community, we expect a lot of different ideas to come out in our exchange of best practices. To see a full listing of the organizations that have signed up already check out the See Who’s Coming page. 

Connection Seminars: Q&A with Citywide Stakeholders 

In “breakout rooms” located outside of the main fair space, there will be representatives of programs which work all across Chicago. If you’re part of an organization, these will be great opportunities to learn more about exciting programs across the city and gain some “how to” at the same time.  To see a full listing of the organizations and topics covered, head over to the Connection Seminars listing page.

The Reception: Celebrate and Learn

After the Share Fair, a reception will be held at the ICA, located at 4750 N Sheridan Ave. Come and learn about Chicago’s very own GreenRise and help us celebrate the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ 50th anniversary. To learn more about the GreenRise tours, head over to the GreenRise Tours page.

During the spring semester of 2012, the 20 students in Prof. Mike Bryson’s SUST 210 Sustainable Future honors class conducted a semester-long community-based research project in conjunction with the ICA’s effort during 2011 and 2012 to map and describe as many sustainability initiatives and assets as possible in each one of Chicago’s 77 official Community Areas. Two RU students, international studies major Dylan Amlin and sustainability studies major Ngozi Okoro,  pursued summer internships with the ICA by conducting community research in several South Side neighborhoods.  As Dylan notes about the Share Fair:

It will be an excellent networking opportunity for students as well, and we could really use some youthful energy in the room. If students are interested in volunteering, they can contact me directly asap (dylanamlin@gmail.com). They also can go to the Accelerate 77 website to learn more about the project and to register.

Join Dylan, Ngozi, and lots of other students, faculty, sustainability professionals, grassroots activists, and area officials for this singular event!

Celebrating Sustainability at GR2012 in Joliet

This past Saturday, I attended GR2012, the 3rd annual Celebrating Sustainability festival in my hometown of Joliet, IL. The past couple of years I had attended with my family purely in the role of visitors to the festival’s original location at the Joliet Public Library / Rock Run Forest Preserve. We checked out the many green products and services among the many exhibits, played games, petted a menagerie of animals, and listened to live music.

RU students (Stephanie and Sean) hobnob with JJC students and alumni (Tiffany, Tori, and Antonio)

But the festival outgrew its site in only two years, so this year’s organizers moved it to more spacious grounds: the West Side campus of Joliet Junior College, which has a beautiful new student center as well as a picnic area near the site of a significant prairie restoration underway at the nation’s oldest community college. And this time, I came as a participant: along with SUST majors Sean Hattan and Stephanie Eisner, I ran an informational table among the dozens of exhibitors at GR2012 to meet and greet visitors and prospective students. And I gave a slideshow presentation entitled Sustainability in the Suburbs – GR2012 19 May 2012 (pdf) during the day’s program of public lectures.

For more on the day’s proceedings, check out this post on the Schaumburg’s Sustainable Future blog.

RU’s Wabash Building Reviewed by the Chicago Tribune’s Blair Kamin

The new 32-story Wabash Building has gotten a lot of buzz within the Chicago architecture scene the last few months as its official ribbon-cutting on May 5th approaches. Today’s lengthy review in the Chicago Tribune by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Blair Kamin, though, is a watershed moment in the building’s emergence onto the Chicago skyline — as well as the region’s educational landscape. As Kamin writes,

[T]here is reason to think that Roosevelt University’s striking new $123 million tower in downtown Chicago (left) will amount to something more than an eye-grabbing envelope.

The 32-story tower, which flaunts a zig-zagging silhouette and an equally arresting skin of blue and green glass, represents Chicago’s latest innovation in skyscraper design. It is a vertical campus, stacking everything from a student union to lecture halls to dorm suites within a single, all-encompassing structure.

Located at 425 S. Wabash Ave. and known simply as the Wabash Building, the tower is the nation’s second tallest academic building after the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. More important, it marks the first time that the dramatic expansion of colleges and universities in Chicago’s Loop has made a major mark on the city’s vaunted skyline. Happily, that impact is worth celebrating.

The tower’s powerfully sculpted exterior soars memorably above the mighty wall of historic buildings along Michigan Avenue (left), including Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler’s adjoining Auditorium Building, which has served as Roosevelt’s home since 1947. It achieves a genuine, artful dialogue between past and present.

As noted elsewhere in Kamin’s review, as well as in Laura Janota’s “Growing A Green Campus” essay in the Fall 2010 Roosevelt Review alumni magazine, the Wabash vertical campus is a LEED-Silver building that incorporates a host of sustainable features — from recycling facilities to energy- and water-efficient fixtures to sustainable building materials. As such, it is an integral part of RU’s continuing efforts to green its physical campus, from its buildings to its exterior landscapes (in the case of the 22-acre Schaumburg Campus).

Food Deserts Presentation at RU this Wed (April 25)

One of the nation’s experts on food deserts and food justice issues, Mari Gallagher, will present her research on Chicago’s food deserts from 2006 to the present at a public lecture at RU’s Chicago Campus this Wednesday, April 25th, at 5:30pm. Gallagher has a flair for discussing a serious topic with a healthy dose of humor and optimism for the future.

I previously commented on a recent New York Times story on food deserts and obesity. Read Gallagher’s response to the Times’ story in this piece from the Chicago Tribune and join the conversation at RU on April 25th.

Don’t miss this free event that is part of RU’s New Deal Service Days!

Date: Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
Time: 5:30pm
Place: Roosevelt University’s Chicago Campus (430 S. Michigan)
Room: Auditorium Building, Congress Lounge (2nd floor)

“Living Downstream” Screens Tonight at RU’s Chicago Campus

In anticipation of Earth Day, Roosevelt University will host a screening tonight (Friday, April 20th) of the acclaimed environmental documentary feature film, Living Downstream, which features the life and work of writer, ecologist, and environmental activist Sandra Steingraber. As explained on the film’s website:

This poetic film follows Sandra during one pivotal year as she travels across North America, working to break the silence about cancer and its environmental links. After a routine cancer screening, Sandra receives some worrying results and is thrust into a period of medical uncertainty. Thus, we begin two journeys with Sandra: her private struggles with cancer and her public quest to bring attention to the urgent human rights issue of cancer prevention.

But Sandra is not the only one who is on a journey—the chemicals against which she is fighting are also on the move. We follow these invisible toxins as they migrate to some of the most beautiful places in North America. We see how these chemicals enter our bodies and how, once inside, scientists believe they may be working to cause cancer.

Several experts in the fields of toxicology and cancer research make important cameo appearances in the film, highlighting their own findings on two pervasive chemicals: atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and the industrial compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Their work further illuminates the significant connection between a healthy environment and human health.

At once Sandra’s personal journey and her scientific exploration, Living Downstream is a powerful reminder of the intimate connection between the health of our bodies and the health of our air, land, and water.

Date:  Friday, April 20th, 2012
Time:  6:00-8:30pm
Place:  Roosevelt University, Chicago Campus, Auditorium Building (430 S. Michigan Ave)
Room:  Congress Lounge (2nd floor)

This event is free and open to the public.  Seating is limited, so please reserve your spot by RSVPing to Prof. Mike Bryson (mbryson@roosevelt.edu or 312.281.3148). A discussion with RU faculty will follow the screening, and light refreshments will be available. Sponsored by the Sustainability Studies Program in the College of Professional Studies at Roosevelt University.

SUST 350’s Workday at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm

This past Wednesday was the third week for my SUST 350 Service & Sustainability class doing work at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm in Cabrini-Green. We help out on a variety of chores and projects at the farm on our Wed afternoon work sessions. Last week we pulled weeds, sifted compost, and harvested thousands of pumpkin seeds from some of last year’s leftover pumpkins. This week we sifted more compost, pulled weeds, and began work on constructing the 2nd hoop house for the farm. Here are some photos I took during that day’s activities.

Our class sessions on Wednesdays start with a discussion from 3-4pm, during which students give short “Farm Reports” on different urban farm operations around the country, and the class as a whole discusses that week’s assigned readings from Lorraine Johnson’s excellent book, City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing. Then, we get together with Growing Power’s Youth Corps kids from the neighborhood, do a few warm-up activities for exercise and community-bonding, and hit the chore list for that day. Our work session ends at 5:30 so students can get to their next class — but most of us are reluctant to stop because it’s so much fun . . . especially when you can work together getting your hands dirty for a good cause.

Here are a few photos from this week.

Josh gives his Farm Report at the picnic area, which doubles as our outside classroom.
Starting work on the farm's 2nd hoop house.
Rows of soil, built onsite from compost, sit atop the old basketball court -- ready for upcoming spring planting.
Steph (L) and Maria sift compost from the worm bin. The result is beautiful, rich, fine soil collected in the tub below the screen; the leftovers are added back into other composting bins.
Watering the compost bins at bit now and again helps speed the decomposition process; these bins can produce good compost in 6-9 months. Not your typical agricultural landscape, eh?

Growing Power’s Urban Farm in Milwaukee

For its first field trip experience this spring, my SUST 350 Service & Sustainability class on urban agriculture, social justice, and community development ventured up Lake Michigan’s western shoreline to the great city of Milwaukee. Our destination was the flagship urban farm operation of Growing Power, the non-profit urban ag enterprise established in 1995 by pro basketball player-turned-urban farmer Will Allen.

Growing Power's flagship farm location in Milwaukee

Since the mid-2000s, Growing Power has expanded its operations to several sites in Chicago, including the Chicago Lights Urban Farm (CLUF) in Cabrini-Green, which is the service learning partner organization / work site for our SUST 350 class this semester.

Our objective in visiting Growing Power’s Milwaukee location was to get a hands-on introduction to one of the most celebrated sustainable urban farm operations in the US. We began our day with a picnic lunch at our urban farm site in Chicago, where we broke bread with CLUF/Growing Power staff and Youth Corps high school student interns. Then, we piled into a rented school bus and headed up to Growing Power’s site on Milwaukee’s Northwest Side, where we got a superb and information-packed 90-minute tour of the entire two-acre facility by Amy, a tour facilitator and full-time employee of the farm.

Growing Power is an example of a hybrid urban farm that is focused on developing sustainable urban farming practices in the production of vegetables (especially baby greens salad mixes), fish (primarily tilapia), animal products (goat milk and meat, eggs and poultry), and compost.

Growing trays in greenhouse #1

Their food is sold to area restaurants, at the Growing Power on-site farm stand, and at various “Market Basket” locations in Milwaukee where fresh food is hard to find. All of their growing soil is produced on-site by a sophisticated and large-scale composting system, which includes an impressive vermiculture operation that uses worms to process plant “waste” into nutrient-rich soil. Growing Power is a pioneer is using closed-loop cultivation systems in which wastewater from the aquaponic fish-growing tank flows through hydroponic plant beds, where various vegetables and flowers take up the excess nutrients from the water; the cleansed water is then returned to the aquaponics tanks, to start the cycle again.

Here, perfect soil is created by worms. Dirt is the great equalizer, the foundation of agriculture -- no matter one's race, color, or creed.
Aquaponic tank, replenished by water filtered by the hydroponically-grown plants in the upper level

The farm also harvests renewable energy from several solar panel arrays, and uses the heat bio-generated from interior composting bins to warm its several large greenhouses and significantly reduce heating costs during the cold Wisconsin winters.

For a more detailed account of our group’s tour, check out the field trip notes taken by Maria Cancilla of our SUST 350 class at the pdf link below and the photos I took of our tour. Also see Growing Power’s website for a wealth of information about the farm as well as virtual tours of its facility.

Growing Power Tour Notes 2012-03-24 (pdf)

Growing Power’s Milwaukee and Chicago facilities are prime examples, but by no means the only ones, of the burgeoning urban farming movement in cities and suburbs across North America. Students in this inaugural section of SUST 350 in Roosevelt’s Sustainability Studies program are working on a community-based research project about the Cabrini-Green neighborhood’s history, present assets, and future prospects. Two-thirds of our class meetings take place at the Chicago Lights Urban Farm in Cabrini-Green, a half-acre urban farm that began as a small community garden built atop a derelict basketball court in 2002. Here we are working side-by-side with Youth Corps teenage interns from the neighborhood to work compost, weed planting beds, harvest seeds from last year’s crops, build a new hoop house, and do whatever else needs to be done in the farm’s early spring work season.

This farm is an inspiring example of how sustainable agriculture in inner-city neighborhoods can contribute to positively to the physical environment, economic activity, educational opportunities, and social fabric of its community. Its example can be a spark for imagining other urban farming projects that could be implemented in underserved communities throughout the greater Chicago region — such as my hometown of Joliet, IL, located 40 miles southwest of Chicago’s Loop.

Vermiculture compost bins inside a greenhouse at Growing Power
The production of compost at Growing Power's 2-acre site is incredible; we called this pile "Mount Compost"
Our group from Roosevelt University and the Chicago Lights Urban Farm

RU Internship and Career Fair on April 12

Roosevelt University will host an Internship and Career Fair at the Chicago Campus on April 12 from 2 to 6 p.m. in the Congress Lounge. Students will have the opportunity to speak directly to employers who have opportunities available immediately. This is also a good chance for those students who still need summer internship options to get that opportunity that they desire. Students must dress to impress and bring plenty of resumes, questions, and a positive attitude. Those who need to polish their resumes or brush-up on interviewing skills contact the Career Development office for help at (312) 341-3560.

For more information, contact Chris Willis, Assistant Director, Employer Relations and Internships, at cwillis@roosevelt.edu.

“Living Downstream” Documentary Feature Screens at RU on April 20th

In anticipation of Earth Day, Roosevelt University will host a screening on Friday, April 20th, of the acclaimed environmental documentary feature film, Living Downstream, which features the life and work of writer, ecologist, and environmental activist Sandra Steingraber. This event is free and open to the public. As explained on the film’s website:

This poetic film follows Sandra during one pivotal year as she travels across North America, working to break the silence about cancer and its environmental links. After a routine cancer screening, Sandra receives some worrying results and is thrust into a period of medical uncertainty. Thus, we begin two journeys with Sandra: her private struggles with cancer and her public quest to bring attention to the urgent human rights issue of cancer prevention.

But Sandra is not the only one who is on a journey—the chemicals against which she is fighting are also on the move. We follow these invisible toxins as they migrate to some of the most beautiful places in North America. We see how these chemicals enter our bodies and how, once inside, scientists believe they may be working to cause cancer.

Several experts in the fields of toxicology and cancer research make important cameo appearances in the film, highlighting their own findings on two pervasive chemicals: atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and the industrial compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Their work further illuminates the significant connection between a healthy environment and human health.

At once Sandra’s personal journey and her scientific exploration, Living Downstream is a powerful reminder of the intimate connection between the health of our bodies and the health of our air, land, and water.

Date:  Friday, April 20th, 2012
Time:  6:00-8:30pm
Place:  Roosevelt University, Chicago Campus, Auditorium Building (430 S. Michigan Ave)
Room:  Congress Lounge (2nd floor)

This event is free and open to the public. A discussion with RU faculty will follow the screening, and refreshments will be available. Sponsored by the Sustainability Studies Program in the College of Professional Studies at Roosevelt University.

RSVP to Professor Mike Bryson at mbryson@roosevelt.edu / 312-281-3148.