• 
  Course Description
• 
  Class Schedule
• 
  Readings
• 
  Projects
• 
  Library Resources
• 
  EES Department
• 
  Politics Department

Journals

Some Guidelines on your Sustainability Journals

As part of the requirements for this course, we have asked you to keep a journal in which you respond to questions about the materials from reading and class. The purpose of the journal is NOT to improve your writing skills (at least directly) but to stimulate thinking about issues, questions, and problems raised by our study of sustainability. This is meant to be an enjoyable exercise!

Accordingly, you will be rewarded for the process of thinking reflected in your journal rather than for the end product. We expect exploratory, expressive writing – thinking aloud on paper. This is also called "focused freewriting" or "train of thought writing". Therefore, formal features such as organization, grammar, spelling, and syntax don’t really matter (though we do hope you keep these components of successful communication in mind). In the end, this type of writing is primarily for you. It’s the process of info rmal writing that is of benefit, not the act of having others read and understand your entries.

This type of journal writing may actually help you become more productive and focused in your thinking. It should help you struggle with the contradictory, complicated, controversial, and convoluted issues of sustainability in a way that makes the topic more interesting and relevant to your own lives. We hope that the journal writing will deepen your understanding of sustainability by allowing you to wonder, speculate, and reflect about the issues.

How long should a journal entry be?
We're not looking for page length, rather we would like each entry to be the result of 15 minutes of concentrated thinking and writing.

How will journals be evaluated?
We'll be looking for evidence that you are thinking (not just filling space with words). Most of the entries will ask you to apply concepts in the readings or discussion in several ways : 1) We may ask you to reflect on how a particular concept applies to your own life, or 2) We may ask you to apply concepts to broader policy or scientific issues. In either case we want you to show that you are wrestling with these concepts. To that end, you must be prepared to write and that means reading carefully or/and listening carefully to discussion. The best journal entries will be interesting because they will reflect that you are grappling with ideas.