The GMC Block Course

Bringing the real world
into focus.
For many students, the GMC interdisciplinary block course is the height of the environmental liberal arts experience. Over an intensive semester of study, overnight outings, discussion groups, and writing, students, faculty, and field professionals exchange their ideas on a single area of focus. Past courses have handled issues like viewpoints on Vermont wilderness management, pollution and despoilment of the Hudson River, and how we can eat more sustainably on campus and in broader communities. The block course is the embodiment of what GMC does best: interdisciplinary, hands-on learning that deals with problems in the community.

An intensive, semester-long look at the whole picture.
A multi-credit block course is offered at least once every two years, ensuring that every Green Mountain student gets a chance to take part. Once students sign up, they're in for an experience like no other: they spend the entire semester working with five professors from multiple disciplines, meeting and sharing knowledge with nationally recognized scholars and experts, and getting out in the field to conduct research that usually leads to a culminating venture. Sometimes that's a class project that helps decide a local political or environmental issue. Or it can be a series of individual projects that center on the course topic. Either way, a block course ends in producing students who are richly informed and connected to the community working in their field.

A symposium of experts converging on one topic.
Students hear it from the best: nationally recognized speakers for past blocks have included John Turenne, former executive chef for Yale; Fred Kirschenmann, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and operator of the 3,500-acre, organic Kirschenmann Family Farms; and Frances Moore Lappé, activist and writer of "Diet for a Small Planet" (1971), founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute. Local activists and experts join in too to inform students of regional issues and show them ways to change our communities for the better.

Take a look at the block courses we've offered in the past to find out more.