Categories: GSI Online Library, Teaching Effectiveness Award Essays
By Kieren Rudge, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025
As a Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley, I have encountered many challenges when teaching courses on environmental issues. While serving as a GSI for both ESPM 163: Environmental Justice and ESPM 100: Environmental Problem Solving I have aimed to bridge the gap students struggle with between academic content and practical solutions. This past semester while teaching ESPM 100, a project-focused course for juniors and seniors in the Conservation and Resource Studies major, I addressed this problem of students feeling a disconnect between what they were learning in class and what they wanted to practically contribute as environmentalists making change in the world. While this course included major projects where students could apply their knowledge, many were seeking insight into how they could translate the knowledge they were developing into action.
To address this problem I began to center discussions around this missing connection. In this course we introduced students to multiple ways of solving environmental problems, critical ways to think about the idea of a “problem” and a “solution”, and examples of different environmental issues that have been addressed, primarily in contemporary U.S. history. To build upon lecture material that covered these topics, I weaved case studies into discussion sections where students were challenged to apply problem solving they were concurrently learning about. It was challenging to strike the chronological balance of extensively teaching students about different forms of problem solving first versus having them attempt to solve case studies first. To help students learn about different applications of environmental problem-solving I had small groups use the tool EJAtlas (an online database of environmental justice cases) to find real cases, rather than abstract ones. By grounding their theoretical frameworks in the analysis of real cases involving struggle between community-based organizations, government institutions, and other actors, students were challenge to critically think about those frameworks. Something I find lacking at the undergraduate level in many of our environmental courses is an opportunity for students to critique what they are learning and test out whether these theories hold up when applied to real cases. This method of having students applying problem solving to analyze cases and discuss in groups whether a particular framework explains what happened in a case pushes students to know the theories well and understand how they can help to shape action.
This method was assessed through the standard end-of-course evaluations, student feedback throughout the semester, and the last week of discussion section being devoted to a student-led discussion on what worked about the course and how it could be improved. Both the students and I appreciated dedicating the last week of class to this collective discussion, which I found to be more fruitful than the standard evaluations because the students were able to articulate their thought more clearly when they had the peers to bounce ideas off of. This evaluation method was very effective in addition to the standard evaluations, and the process revealed that students were supportive of the theory-action gap case study strategy and wanted to see more of that in future courses. Additionally, they highly valued consistency and clarity in the class and wanted to see us do a better job of having a clear plan throughout the semester that was followed well.