It’s far from the bustle of Columbia’s campus. Climate School Undergraduate Programs I recently travelled to Katihank Island, Massachusetts to explore sustainability through my living experience.
Cuttyhunk Practicum began in 2024 as a partnership between Columbia and Professor Bernard Jason Smurdon and Sandra Gold Mark and Gull Island InstituteThe classroom-to-island initiative provides sustainable development students with practical opportunities to explore the implications of well-established places.
Designed to meet the requirements for one credit lab in the program, the course invites students to explore sustainability on a local scale by spending three days at Cuttyhunk Island, a small community off the coast of Massachusetts. “Sustainability is an applied issue,” Smerdon said. “And it is important to enable students to engage in place-based learning as a way to understand how local challenges and opportunities ultimately define specific sustainability pathways for a particular location or community.”
“This is an incredible course that brings back to life the sustainable system we just read and offers an unusual opportunity for small island communities to experience how these principles can be guided into daily practice.”
The course begins with a preparatory workshop on the Columbia campus before students travel to the island. There, they interact with local leaders, members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, small business owners, and municipal officials, and participate in the daily rhythm of island life.
Students take full responsibility for planning, preparing and serving their own meals, as they learn about the island’s facilities and operations. This is a process that serves as a resource management and collective decision-making exercise.
This integration of academic learning, physical work and shared governance promotes deep reflection, collaboration among students, and emotional connection with the local environment.
For field coordinators, this participatory model promotes not only environmental awareness, but also a sense of possibilities and community. “In addition to working hard and thinking together, we can find a source of real play and fun as a group,” Anisa Belcailson, co-founder and co-director of the Gull Island Institute, emphasizes the institutional sense that is important for students entering the field of sustainability.
Gabriel Najum Splatt, an anthropology major focused on sustainable development, said his favorite part of the class is to learn about oyster hatching.
“In New York, we rarely eat straight from the sauce. We pulled oysters out of hatchery water and then we had a magical thing.
These local experiences reflect deeper questions that lock the course.
Students are challenged to interpret the surrounding landscapes, objects and ecosystems rather than relying solely on reading. It encourages the island to be realized as its own living text and link abstract concepts to concrete actions. On-site lectures explore the natural and human history of the Buzzards Bay region, including its encounters between Europe and modern times and its heritage of modern climate adaptation efforts.
Throughout time at Cuttyhunk, students come to see the islands not only as remote locations but as places of convergence, offering unique forms of knowledge shaped by communities, ecological history and interdependence.
Throughout the course, students begin to understand sustainability not only as a global challenge, but also as a deep, local, relational practice that shapes how they learn, live and act in the world.
Immering in the island environment, they begin to link those insights to the urban landscape of their own lives in Manhattan, rethinking how they engage with sustainability in a more intentional and grounded way.
Kilson explained that in the context of liberal arts education it is rare for students to experience a place where all of their systems (water, waste, waste, transportation, economy, society, economy) can be experienced on such a manageable scale.
“The three “pillars” structure of our pedagogy (scholar, labor, autonomy) allows students to collectively handle what they are learning from various angles.
Throughout the course, students begin to understand sustainability not only as a global challenge, but also as a deep, local, relational practice that shapes how they learn, live and act in the world.
“This trip reminded me that the climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts I’ve been working on in my career should be learned based on location-based knowledge,” said Rebeka Tatham, a student of sustainable development.
Travel was made possible by generous funds from Denning Global Fellow Sustainable Development Programme and Schwefermanments Fund.
