Students receive national recognition for Shaw program

When Wharton junior John Seeg and College junior Abby Close enrolled in several service-learning classes, they never expected that their course work would take them to Boston for an academic conference. Last year, Seeg and Close began the development of an interdisciplinary environmental science program for Shaw Middle School in West Philadelphia. The pair used their experiences at Shaw as a springboard for the project. Seeg and Close then wrote about their ideas for the service-learning course -- taught by Urban Studies Professor Ira Harkavy -- which was entitled "Reinventing American Universities to Reconstruct American Cities." As they finished the paper, the Interdisciplinary Environmental Association advertised that it was looking for academic papers on environmental education for an upcoming conference. Seeg and Close saw the ad and submitted their paper to the IEA's blind review process. In the blind process, a committee of assorted college professors reviewed their paper without knowing who had submitted it. The committee accepted Seeg and Close's paper, inviting them to be founding members of and participants in the first annual Interdisciplinary Conference on the Environment. When conference organizers determined who had written the paper, they were surprised to find that Seeg and Close were undergraduates. After accepting academics from 14 different countries, most of whom were full college professors, the committee was uncertain what to do with the undergraduates they had just selected. Initially, the committee decided to invite the pair to the conference, but said they would not publish their paper with those of other participants. But later, they agreed to publish Seeg and Close's paper in the conference proceedings, which contain all papers that had been accepted. Seeg and Close traveled to Boston's Park Plaza Hotel in the spring for the conference. "We didn't fit in with anyone, because we were undergrads and our topic [was unique]," Close said. Seeg and Close were the only participants to present a paper linking an interdisciplinary environmental education program to urban renewal. While IEA conference organizers were originally uncertain about their choice of undergraduates as participants, the pair's performance quickly changed their minds. Planners of the IEA's second conference have asked Seeg and Close to help organize a session on environmental education. They will travel to Newport, R.I., in June to participate in the next conference. "The fact that John and Abby's work was so well received is indicative of what happens when the talent of undergraduates are directed toward issues that are of fundamental importance to the University and society," Harkavy said. This fall, the Science Alliance, the program Seeg and Close developed, took its place among the four inter-disciplinary curricula that make up Shaw's new learning community-based academic program this year. Seeg and Close will be reworking their paper for this year's conference. "This year is going to be a huge growth year for the program," Seeg said. "We will incorporate those gains in the paper. They will also write about the program's benefit to the University community, Close added.