As an immersive learning, research, and demonstration site that shows how to live sustainably in the Midwest, this project plays a major role in moving Ball State students (and students anywhere in the world through the University’s Global Media Network) from a discipline-specific way of thinking to integrated systems-thinking. It helps move the educational model from department-based to interdisciplinary and systemic. It engages interdisciplinary teams, like the ones in this P3 award project, in interdisciplinary immersion experiences in all phases of the resource balance site management model and ecobalance designTM process. Faculty in diverse disciplines integrate site monitoring into their classes, and thereby contribute to the FSEEC’s resource-balancing database and the LDI’s ecobalance designTM. In this manner they learn how to apply the disciplinary expertise that they have gained in their degree program in interdisciplinary contexts to make decisions based on P3 relationships to produce sustainable communities.
Ball State and other higher education students interact with the
learning module (and other future LandLab modules) to understand ecobalance concepts, design ecobalance solutions, monitor ecobalance performance and through the process understand systems, life cycles, and ecobalance decision-making. They enhance the site existing ecobalance GIS batabase, use this database to understand regenerative systems and life cycles, and implement sustainable design. They make decisions based on sustaining the site’s productive potential for food, energy, air, material, and so on. They learn how to intervene in systems such that downstream potential is at least as high after intervention as it was before intervention.