Topics vary by semester
Professor(s)
Notes
This class includes an €850 class fee to cover travel as well as room and board for the stay in the second week of the class.This course explores how societies and communities cultivate resilience in the face of the climate crisis, with a focus on both inner development and collective ecological practices. Using Paris and France as our living classroom, the course examines sustainability through the interplay between personal resilience (guided by the Inner Development Goals) and community-based models such as eco-village that foster regenerative ways of living.
In Week 1, students will be based in Paris, engaging with actors in the Economie Sociale et Solidaire (ESS), a framework for building a caring, cooperative, equitable urban society. Through site visits, discussions, and guided reflection, students will encounter innovative social initiatives such as third spaces, cooperatives, NGOs (Association 1901), foundations and the French model of mutuelles as initiatives addressing climate, equity, and community well-being.
In Week 2, we shift to rural France to visit eco-villages that integrate ecological design, permaculture, rewilding, and collaborative governance. Students will live alongside community members and participate in daily life, learning how ecological and social resilience are practiced, negotiated, and sustained.
In Week 3, students synthesize their learning through a collaborative multimedia project that weaves together course readings, personal reflections, and field experiences. This culminating work invites students to reflect on their evolving understanding of resilience, and social models of change.
Learning Outcomes
- Students will enhance their understanding of the complexity and challenges of real world concerns and their creative capacity to address them. (CCX LO1)
- Students will interpret intercultural experience from the perspectives of own and more than one worldview and demonstrate ability to initiate and develop interaction with culturally different others. (CCX LO2)
- Students will engage in the self-assessment, reflection and analysis of this experience that prepares them for future success and be able to articulate this to future educational and professional interlocutors. (CCX LO3)
- Students will be able to position themselves critically in relationship to these concerns, considering the efficacy, consequences, and ethical dimensions of their actions in a given place and context. (CCX LO4)