Denise Nepveux, Ph.D. has been named one of 12 Climate and Sustainability Teaching Fellows. Led by the Nicholas School of the Environment and Duke Learning Innovation, the program supports a peer learning community for faculty and other instructors who are interested in redesigning an existing course to substantively engage with issues of climate and sustainability, to be taught in fall 2023 or spring 2024.
Dr. Nepveux is working to revise a portion of the epidemiologically informed, community-engaged first-year ACT (Assembling, Creating and Translating Knowledge) course that she co-facilitates with Emily D’Agostino, Ph D, to incorporate climate, ecology, and sustainability into our framework of social drivers of health. ACT student projects may then involve surveys concerning the ecological sustainability of individual, group, and/or community-level occupational patterns such as shopping and food preparation, commuting patterns, decorating a dorm room, etc. We may also engage with community partners for quality improvement projects concerning promising practices, or “eco-occupations” such as community gardening or re-greening of play spaces to understand how and whether they foster well-being while simultaneously mitigating environmental harms.
“This is a timely opportunity for Duke OTD to build stronger connections across Duke’s campus. and our field. It will connect us with valuable learning spaces, actions, and scholarship across campus that are part of Duke’s Climate Commitment,” Nepveux said. “As students learn to bring OT/OS insights to sustainability and to forge community-informed, actionable responses to the climate crisis, they will be engaging with cutting-edge developments in our field.”