Away from the hustle and bustle of Columbia’s campus, a group of undergraduate students managed by the Climate College’s undergraduate program in their degree program, recently headed to Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts to explore sustainability through life experiences.
The Cuttyhunk Internship, which started in 2024, is a partnership between Columbia and Barnard Professor Jason Smerdon and Sandra Goldmark and Gull Island Institute’s Classroom and Island Initiative, provides sustainable students with a hands-on opportunity to study the meaning of living in one place.
The course aims to meet the program’s one-credit practice requirements, inviting students to spend three days of immersive days on Cuttyhunk Island, a small community on the Massachusetts coast to explore sustainability at a local scale. “Sustainability is an application issue and it is crucial that we engage students in place-based learning to understand how local challenges and opportunities ultimately define specific pathways for sustainable development in a given location or community,” Smerdon said.
“It’s a wonderful lesson that fills life with sustainable systems we’ve read only, and it’s a rare opportunity to experience how the island community incorporates these principles into everyday practices,” said Charlie Nam of Sustainable Teenagers.
The course begins with students heading to the island’s Columbia campus. There, they interacted with local leaders, members of the tribe of Aquinnah Wampanoag, members of small business owners and municipal officials, while attending the daily rhythm of island life.
While understanding the island’s facilities and operations, students assume full responsibility for planning, preparing and serving their own meals, a process that becomes an exercise in resource management and collective decision-making.
The integration of academic learning, sporting work and co-governance promotes profound reflection, collaboration and emotional connections between students and with the local environment.
For field coordinators, this participatory model promotes not only environmental awareness, but also a possibility and community awareness. “Besides thinking very hard and really hard, we are able to find real sources of gaming and fun,” said Ana Isabel Keilson, co-founder and co-executive director of the Owl Island Institute, which is crucial for students entering the field of sustainability.
Anthropology major Gabriel Najum Spratt, who focuses on sustainability, said his favorite class was learning the Oyster Hatchery.
“In New York, we rarely eat directly from the source. It’s magical to pull the oysters out of the water in the hatchery and drag them to that point. Experiences like this emphasize the need for fresh food in urban areas.”
These local experiences reflect the deeper question of the anchoring curriculum: What does it mean to live in a good place?
Rather than relying solely on reading, students are challenged to explain the surrounding landscape, objects, and ecosystems rather than treating the island as its own text of life and encourage them to connect abstract concepts with concrete actions. The live speech explores the natural and human history of the Condor Bay area, including the legacy of European indigenous encounters and contemporary climate adaptation efforts.
Through time on Cuttyhunk, students come to the island not only as remote locations, but also as a fusion site that provides unique forms of knowledge in community, ecological history and interdependent forms.
Through this course, students begin not only to understand sustainability as a global challenge, but also a profound local relationship practice that can reshape the way they learn, live and act in the world.
Immersed in the island environment, they began to connect these insights to the urban landscape of Manhattan living, rethinking how to interact with sustainability in a more intentional, rooted way.
Keilson explains that in the context of liberal arts education, students rarely experience the location of all their systems (water, power, waste, transportation, economic, social, social and economic) that can be experienced on such a loose scale.
“The structure of our three pillars of pedagogy (scholars, labor and autonomy) enables students to work together on what they learn from a range of perspectives, which in turn allows them to be accountable for their education both inside and outside the classroom and to be created for the impact that their education has,” she said.
Through this course, students begin not only to understand sustainability as a global challenge, but also a profound local relationship practice that can reshape the way they learn, live and act in the world.
“This trip reminds me that any work I’ve done in my career to reduce climate change and adaptability should be rooted in place-based knowledge,” said Rebeka Tatham, a sustainability student.
This trip was made through a lot of money from Danny Global Fellow Sustainability Program and Schwoeffermann-Menz Foundation.
