Community Engaged Practicum

Our senior environmental studies majors collaborate with community organizations to lend their creativity, perspectives, and research skills to addressing current environmental issues in our region and beyond.

Current Projects: Spring 2026

This spring we are offering two sections of ENVS 0401:

ENVS 0401 A Community Engaged Environmental Studies Practicum Presentations: Environmental Health Disparities and Climate Vulnerability

This section of ENVS 401 explores environmental health themes, including contaminants in food (e.g. chemicals in seafood) and food security, how climate change exacerbates health vulnerabilities, how to support and strengthen environmental health locally in light of federal policy changes, and emergency preparedness. These are critical themes to explore as our ecosystems and communities face real risks from environmental degradation, pollution, and climate change. Declining environmental quality affects the health of marginalized communities most substantially, and projects for this section will address how social and structural determinants of health amplify health burdens. Throughout, the goal is to strive to provide resources, strategies, and policy recommendations to help alleviate impacts for the most vulnerable members of our community. Projects will connect students with local, state and regional organizations working on issues such as the provision of health services, mental and physical health impacts of climate change, chemicals of concern, and the effectiveness and health-related communications among other topics.

Project partners:

• Vermont Food Security Coalition
• Vermont Department of Health
• Green Mountain Justice
• Vermont State University
• Unitarian Universalist Ministry in Community-Building

ENVS 0401 B Community Engaged Environmental Studies Practicum Presentations: Social Change and/or Transformation

This section of ENVS 401 explores the question of “social change”: what it is, what it looks like, how it happens, and how to do it. Specifically, our will seminar will engage diverse efforts in Vermont broadly aimed at enacting a just transition away from an unsustainable, oftentimes inequitable status quo. What kinds of strategies might be needed at this critical juncture to effect real structural transformation, change the rules of the game, and dislodge business-as-usual? How do organizers go about building power and fostering the collective capacities needed by ordinary people to fight their way out of the everyday crises rendering life precarious? What sorts of methods, frameworks, and underlying assumptions about making change do different groups bring to this work? Students will partner with a range of groups as they attempt to work out the necessary preconditions for achieving systemic change (rigorously tracing how to get from “here” to “there”); to bring together the requisite coalitions of actors who will carry out such change (out of what can be a fractious set of constituencies); and to assemble the various practical building blocks needed for a sufficient and equitable response to the startling task of rapidly overhauling “all aspects of society” (as scientific bodies like the IPCC have demanded). In sum, project teams will support the work of community partners each pressing for change, and sometimes even transformation: in their own ways, within their respective contexts, and positioned in unique roles with different theories of change.

Project partners:

• 350 Vermont
• Rockefeller Family Fund
• Workers United
• Land Access Opportunity Board
• Vermont Department of Public Service

Past Projects: Fall 2025

In collaboration with our community partners, we offered two sections of the practicum. One section (ENVS0401A) was focused on “Building for the future while navigating uncertainty” and specifically looked at how local community organizations have and will continue their work toward equitable, resilient, and just communities in Vermont. The second section (ENVS0401B) focused on “What’s Next” and worked with partner organizations to review the successes and failures of 20 years of movement building, globally and locally, and looked at how the movement could move forward during current tumultuous times.

Community partners for the fall were:

• Vermont Department of Public Service
• Vermont State Treasurers Office
• Vermont Natural Resources Council
• Vermont Office of Economic Opportunity
• Vermont Gas Systems (VGS)
• Vermont Futures Initiative
• Addison Housing Works
• Middlebury College

SECTION A: Building for the Future While Navigating Uncertainty
SECTION B: What’s Next?

Capstone Course Model

Middlebury College’s environmental studies capstone is designed to have students integrate and apply a range of disciplinary perspectives to a community research challenge. This interdisciplinary thinking is enhanced through the core-focus-capstone structure of our major. The consideration of diverse perspectives is further promoted by 1) practicum partnerships with “guest experts” from the community who lead field trips, present their work and research, and mentor students during the semester, and 2) faculty and staff representing varied expertise responding to students’ oral and written project progress reports.

Research challenges are developed with our community partners in advance of the semester. Students typically work in teams of five, within a 15–20 person seminar. The seminar is dedicated to project-based work, yet also includes six sessions of student-led reading discussion of the relevant literature, three field trips and/or meetings with guest experts, reflective writing assignments, and a workshop on persuasive speaking. Project management consists of a minimum of three sessions with the community partner, written work plans and progress reports, weekly oral progress reports for peer feedback, and the mid-term oral progress report for faculty and staff noted above. The seminar culminates with oral and written presentations. The themes for the seminar are determined through a combination of known community needs and the areas of interest and expertise of the faculty leading the seminar any given semester.

The Lintilhac Foundation Environmental Studies Studio

The Environmental Studies Program at Middlebury College gratefully acknowledges the gift of the Environmental Studies Studio by the Lintilhac Foundation. The studio hosts the Community Engaged Environmental Studies Practicum.