IN-PERSON: Applying Education

Abstract

Launched in Fall 2021, the Rhizome Living-Learning Community is a partnership between Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture, Arts, and Design and Division of Student Affairs. Featuring an interdisciplinary, multigenerational mix of curricular and co-curricular experiences, it aims to help undergraduate students gain the skills and perspectives to tackle complex global challenges through a combination of design thinking, systems thinking, sustainable development, and project-based learning. Yearly learning is centered on one of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and approaches a complex global challenge from both global and local perspectives. The culmination of the year is a sustained and iterative project in collaboration with a community partner, offering design-based solutions to one or more problems faced by that partner. In Rhizome’s first year, the theme was food insecurity and sustainable agriculture, with the focus shifting to sustainable cities and communities in the second. This paper reflects on these first two years of Rhizome, in particular on the challenges and possibilities represented by Rhizome’s unique blended emphasis on policy and design interventions. How do design and engineering students understand their relationships to policy? How do students in the humanities and sciences contribute to design projects? How does peer-to-peer learning—specifically, organization into interdisciplinary design teams—impact students’ understanding of their roles in addressing complex global challenges? By answering these and related questions, this paper offers guidance and possibilities for the creation and sustenance of similar living-learning communities.