Washington & Jefferson College

Environmental Studies

 

EVS260

 

The course draws extensively from the instructor's experiences as a change agent working with natural resource conservation in Africa.Diffusion of Environmental Innovations

This course introduces students to the role of being a professional "change agent" when working with new ideas and change. The focus is on ideas/changes within the environmental conservation/management arena and the attendant social consequences. Through a mixture of lectures, discussions, case studies, and field experiences students understand the processes by which innovations are adopted and diffused among people. By the end of the course, students know the methodologies for planning and implementing change and are able to anticipate and predict the consequences of planned change. This culminates in students preparing a "strategy for change" and presenting it to the class.
 
This is the same course as SOC 363.
 
This class is offered during the fall semester of even-numbered years and fulfills the following college requirements:
  • Cultural Diversity
  • Social Science elective in EVS Program
  • Elective in the College Social Science Division
In order to ensure sustained adoption of an innovation, the innovation should possess/exhibit relative advantage over existing options, compatibility with exisitng socio-cultural values, a low level of complexity, a comfortable level of trialability, and ease of observability.Selected presentations:
 

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