Today was a busy first day back at Hampton University.  The dean re-introduced me to the faculty with a big “welcome home!”  I have to admit,  my colleagues’ enthusiastic greetings made me feel like a superstar all day.

After the morning keynote sessions, the whole faculty headed over to the HU waterfront for our annual picnic. This year’s weather was amazing and the jazz ensemble sounded lovely.

The faculty wrapped up the afternoon with information sessions, one of which I helped facilitate.  My colleagues and I encouraged our peers to integrate environmental topics into the courses they teach.

You can view my Prezi online:  I showed a few images of how we integrate sustainability into architecture courses at HU.  I also discussed the “Educational Planning for Environmental Sustainability” course I teach in the summer at William and Mary.  I took the opportunity to promote student-centered pedagogies (which I studied at Dublin Institute of Technology) and the importance of getting students to generate new knowledge (a core idea in W&M’s School of Education).

The schedule for the week-long Faculty Institute

Hampton University’s beautiful Memorial Chapel

The Hampton waterfront, ready for our faculty picnic

My sustainability colleagues enjoying jazz over lunch

View of the marina across the Hampton River

The facilitators for today’s sustainability workshops: Drs. Shannon Chance, Barbara Abraham, Andrij Horodysky, Carmina Sanchez, Deidre Gibson, and Benjamin Cuker.

We started with a few short presentations…

…including mine…

…on the sustainability course I teach at William and Mary.

We spoke with half the faculty in each session.

Carmina did the session wrap up.

We gave everyone time to generate ideas for integrating sustainability into their own course activities.

…and share ideas…

…by school…

and present the ideas to the whole group.

Everyone got involved…

…and we came up with…

…some interesting ideas…

…that we will soon post…

…on a website…

…to keep us moving forward…

…and working to make this world a better place.

I even got to share some ideas from my time in Dublin.